Teacher speaks about lack of classroom support and abuse in schools

[HettyMeg]

Teacher from Inverurie talking about lack of support assistants. She's visibly upset and talks about the violence and abuse she's experienced. This is not acceptable!

Is this becoming more widespread? My child is nursery age at the moment so I am not personally knowledgeable about primaries but I have heard a few stories like this, very concerning.

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The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The child can still have an SEN need but not have appropriate support or boundaries in place and so lashes out with behaviour as there is no consequence. The majority of the children I see with major behaviour issues either have some kind of trauma or are SEN (undiagnosed).

As I said before- Children with SEN can behave. My daughter is also autistic and has no issues with behaviour at school. It’s the system and how we manage problems that is the issue, not over diagnosis of SEN .

If you have a special, small class for children with similar special needs to your child where they are able to reach their potential, within a mainstream school but with specialist special needs teachers and equipment etc, then that sounds good and I'm glad it exists where you are and is working for your child. There doesn't have to be a rule that special needs classes have to be in a separate location.

Do you think there can sometimes be a muddying of the water between SEN, possible but undiagnosed SEN, trauma, possible but undiagnosed trauma and children who may have had bad parenting in their early years and misbehave badly from the outset, and continue to do so when there are no consequences? That's what's been suggested further up the thread - that extremely bad behaviour is now talked of as "trauma".
What clearly makes all this much more difficult is the shortage of people to diagnose and treat issues.

Any child who isn’t violent or disruptive to the learning of others should be given a place in mainstream if they want it, regardless of disability. I don’t see that anyone has an issue with that.

Yes there can definitely be muddying of the water and SEN and trauma presentation are very similar but that’s why it is important for there to be proper and timely assessments which are difficult to access.

As for poor parenting- yes that’s a factor in extreme circumstances too but isn’t that linked to trauma? Neglect/addiction?

In my view all behaviour is communication. It’s rare to have a child who behaves in such a way without an underlying trauma/ASN or both. I don’t think chalking it up to screens and lazy parenting is helpful. If the parenting is so lazy that the child is attacking teachers then that indicates some kind of neglect, abuse or Childhood adverse experience, or inability to regulate due to ASN.

What we've been told is that there's a view that bad behaviour is due to trauma or SEN, and that those children should not be disciplined, just spoken to gently and asked not to do it again. What are your thoughts?

My thoughts are that there needs to be both a trauma informed response and clear boundaries and consequences!

The problem nowadays is that children who simply do not behave because of bad parenting are now being noted as having 'behavioural problems' and 'SEN' when there is no real foundation for this type of labelling in their case.

In Scotland it is ASN (additional support needs) not SEN. Family problems, edge of care, drug taking, behavioural difficulties, English as an additional language, interrupted learning, bereavement, young carers are all ASN.

You're right, of course, but the general point stands - children with behavioural issues are being lumped in with children with learning difficulties and this gives a false picture of what is happening in our schools, in particular with regard to Alternative Arrangements for exams.

Children with significant behavioural difficulties are not going to suddenly achieve academic success off the back of ten more minutes and the ability to type in their exam.

Have you worked in the secondary sector?

That's a gross simplification of everything that's involved: "ten more minutes and the ability to type in their exam" indeed! Alternative Arrangements are not the same for everyone as I'm sure you're aware. (Having '"the ability to type in the exam" would certainly not suit the needs of many pupils with specific learning difficulties.)

I don't have time to list the many possible arrangements which are made at exam time for those with specific difficulties or those which can sometimes be put in place for children with English as a second or additional language depending on certain conditions. [Latterly, I spent a great deal of time battling an SLT that thought that Alternative Arrangements meant "just give them a bit of extra time and a PC" - the appealing option because it's often the cheapest.]

So far as children with behavioural issues are concerned - and I'm not talking about children who simply cannot help themselves because of an underlying problem - the one that comes to my mind is the violent pupil who spent years disrupting the education of others, This was partly because of their parent, who worked in a law firm and who kept threatening to sue if they didn't get their own way.

This particular little darling was given a whole-school transfer to our school after a particularly violent episode at their previous school.

Short version: after two years of disruption and violence (including breaking another child's nose during lunch hour) this pupil affected the life chances of other pupils by completely disrupting a prelim.

Before anyone asks, yes, police did attend after the lunch time beating - which happened off the premises. The violent pupil was 15 at the time.

So far as the prelim was concerned, the parent threatened to sue the LA if the school continued to describe the behaviour that had taken place.

In order to prevent a repeat in the actual SQA exams, we had to remove the disruptive pupil from that situation. To placate the disruptive pupil's parent, the Alternative Arrangements were presented as being in the best interests of that pupil.

Separate accommodation and invigilation was supplied for all their exams at a significant cost. On paper, this pupil had merely had Alternative Arrangements.

This is a pupil who was pandered to all the way through their school career. There was never any expectation that the pupil or parent should be held accountable and resources were expended on this person instead of being made available to those who would truly have benefited.

I am well aware of AAA - I have a disabled DC who requires them.

So your complaint is the additional cost of an extra invigilator? That is peanuts compared to the cost of a place in a proper behaviour support unit, which in turn is peanuts compared to the ongoing cost to society of an adult who is unable to behave.

I think although it is all grouped under ASN, the point is as educational professionals we do treat children as individuals and according to their own circumstances. The ASN umbrella is more of an admin/data thing than having any real impact on how children are treated.

That is not sufficient. Many children with ASN have disabilities and education authorities (and therefore schools) must pre-emptively consider any ways in which these children could suffer detriment because of that disability. That includes accessibility (including lighting/sound), how information is provided, training, equipment, staff and plans - including co-ordinated support plans.

Stating ‘ASN is just an admin/data thing’ shows ignorance of the law.

I’m not saying that we don’t do that at all.

I think you missed my point to be honest.

With the forthcoming 5 years of of SNP government we can expect schools only to continue their rapid decline. Great! Time to start saving to put another child through private secondary.

The curriculum is awful though, so you ideally need to find a private school which doesn't follow the Curriculum of Excellence.

I’m a parent of children in primary school and what I’m reading here is horrifying me.

Someone should send this thread to Jenny Gilruth’s office and ask for comment!

From this thread it sounds as if by clinging to their woke policies the Government is knowingly creating high conflict environments where children are sent into school where the constant threat of violence is a given.

Dismaying to think that if it’s been like this for some time there are now teachers who have never known anything different.

Is the behaviour of this generation some kind of canary in the mine for a wider societal issue? What is it telling us? Is it stressors created by the cost of living crisis; the limitations of liberalism; or the knock-on effect of everyone having digital lives nowadays? Or what?

That all said, I’m a petite, soft-spoken, middle-aged woman, and I volunteer at my children’s school (a GME school, so perhaps fewer SEN children?) for a lunchtime club. I’ve never witnessed or experienced anything beyond high-spirited high jinks. Though I have heard of a couple isolated incidents of a child having a meltdown, both times in the classrooms of newly qualified teachers. And also of some bullying… and now I’m wondering just how serious that is.

Well it isn’t going to get any better for the next five years….

@Dunderheided I think that the word "meltdown" can be used to cover a wide variety of situations!

As a former teacher in a Fife school, Jenny Gilruth has a very good idea of the situation, but appeared to be in complete denial as soon as she became a member of the Scottish parliament.

The one politician that I've heard speaking up about the situation in Fife schools and in the country as a whole would be Willie Rennie. I think that he was shaken when the Waid Academy footage was circulated: the Waid is in his north-east Fife constituency and has always been deemed to be a 'good' state school.

To address something that I referred to in a previous post. Yes, of course some bad behaviour is a trauma response - but that's not the case for most pupils involved in disruption in schools and there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that treating all bad behaviour as a trauma response has been to the detriment of schools as a whole.

It might be that at times a pupil is communicating that they don't want to do the work in front of them because they find it boring, but - quite frankly - it's not possible to make everything interesting and fun.

If you want to pass National 5 English R.U.A.E. paper, then there's no getting away from the fact that at some point you're going to have to buckle down and attempt practice questions and full practice papers.

In the actual SQA exams, someone who disrupts an exam - even by accident - can lose all credit for that exam and for the full diet that year. I felt sorry for the pupil who had dutifully dumped their backpack at the front of the hall but had forgotten to remove their phone.

The phone went off. The Chief Invigilator made a report to the SQA. The SQA decreed that the pupil lost all credit for that particular subject.

I found that harsh, but no one ever forgot to hand in their phone again.

By contrast, you can giggle and deliberately thump about desks during a prelim paper and the worst that happens these days is that you're given separate accommodation for your actual exams.

This does not just mean that the school has to pay the cost of one extra invigilator. This means that the school has to find separate accommodation for each paper being sat by the pupil and an extra invigilator for each paper - being conservative, at least 10 extra invigilators for the papers.

The accommodation aspect may well result in 'quiet' pupils entitled to Alternative Arrangements finding themselves in on room merely separated by dividers, in order to allow the disruptive pupil to have a room to themselves. This in itself can have a knock-on effect with pupils being persuaded to type up their answers when they'd actually do far better with a human scribe.

If the disruptive pupil is sitting some papers at N4 level, then we have a whole new level of complexity. For N4, N3 and N2 you're graded on Learning Outcomes. This means that you don't have a simple pass mark - you have to pass each LO. (This was also the case for the internal assessments for N5 and Higher but I believe that there have been

Ergo, if you pass one LO and fail the rest then you're allowed umpteen attempts to pass the rest. This means that school staff are taken away from working with other pupils.

This is to the particular detriment of pupils with support needs. Typically, a school will have one Pupil Support Assistant who is shared by two or three classes, meaning that there might only be one or two periods a week when the PSA is available to one particular class.

To complicate matters, unless a pupil is so able that they're guaranteed a Nat 5 pass, the chances are that they'll also need to pass the Nat 4 outcomes as a safety net.

It's not unheard of for one class to contain two or more pupils with dyslexic tendencies, a couple of pupils with English as a Second Language, another pupil with a processing disorder... Then the one period a week that the P.S.A. is available, they're being taken out of the class to work with the disruptive pupil to make sure that they finish all their Learning Outcomes.

Yes, in an ideal world we'd have more tutorial rooms and a Pupil Support Base with multiple discrete sections and multiple staff. The reality is that we do not.

Unless you've actually worked in a secondary school where there are multiple children with support needs, you have no idea of the reality. Be in no doubt - there are children nowadays whose bad behaviour is down to a failure to put in place in boundaries and consequences and the children who suffer the most are those with genuine support needs.

If you take the view that all support needs are genuine, then I would say that the support need for a pupil who does not have a learning difficulty would be the implementation of firm boundaries.

Children aren't stupid. They inform staff that they can do what they want until they're 16.

@Dunderheided

Everything that I hear tells me that GME schools tend to have much better behaviour than others, since the schools tend to be selected by parents who are heavily invested in their children's education.

I mentioned in a pp that a former colleague has moved north. She is working in the English speaking part of the local high school, but has enrolled her child in the local GME primary school. My understanding is that they'll eventually transfer to the local high school where they'll have the opportunity to continue much of their education in Gaelic.

You are still ignoring the fact that a disruptive pupil who disrupts for the sheer hell
if it STILL has an ASN. They still need specialist support to help them learn appropriate behaviour, possibly in a different setting.

What would you have society do? Expel them? Then what? Spend far more than you have suggested above on a place in a young offenders institution followed by adult jail interspersed by periods on benefits? Plus dealing with the cost of their crimes? we need pupil referral units again for these pupils. It s also perhaps not surprising that children in deprived areas are far less likely to be diagnosed with neurodevelopmental conditions like DLD, ADHD, DCD etc than children in better off areas, and not because the prevalence of these conditions is lower.

Agreed that we need pupil referral units, not within school where the bullies can access innocent children to beat up but somewhere totally separate.

I have spoken to Willie Rennie about violence and he is well aware of the issues and is trying to get the message out there to anyone oblivious about how bad it is in schools. If anyone is having issues it’s well worth emailing him constituent or not. I was glad to see him retain his seat. I thought it was Bell Baxter that had real issues, not Waid but it’s probably both.

You're giving exactly the same arguments made by Education Officers who are no longer working in actual schools.

Unfortunately, the LAs are not providing schools with sufficient human and monetary resources. The result is that children with actual learning disabilities are losing out, as I've indicated above.

If it's a choice between benefiting a child with learning disabilities and benefiting a child who is misbehaving for the hell of it, the only moral thing to do is to protect the child with learning disabilities.

Children who only misbehave for the hell of it can behave when boundaries and consequences are set in place. At one time, a candidate who disrupted a prelim would be told that they would not be sitting the actual SQA exam for that subject. They would be allowed to sit their other exams, but with the knowledge of what would happen if they disrupted again. That consequence was quite effective.

The exam board still uses that consequencet: if the SQA's Turnitin application finds that a candidate has submitted plagiarised coursework, then the school is provided with the proof, the candidate is interviewed and a report submitted. The candidate then receives a set of results which have a blank instead of a grade next to the subject where the coursework was plagiarised.

In a pp, I mentioned a candidate whose mobile phone went off during an SQA exam.The same happened to that candidate - there was a blank instead of a grade.

I agree that we need pupil referral units. They still exist in various forms, but I'm told that they will now only accept pupils who are 'known to the police'. The last that I was aware, those local to me were only accepting pupils on a part-time basis.