82% of teachers surveyed say pupil misbehaviour is widespread at their school

[noblegiraffe]

It’s not just untucked shirts either:

“with more than half (57 per cent) saying they had been verbally abused by a pupil in the last year, 18 per cent having been threatened with violence and 14 per cent having been physically attacked.”

Just to balance out the threads of parents complaining about schools enforcing the rules. Maybe there’s a reason for it.

www.tes.com/news/behaviour-widespread-problem-say-82-teachers

noblegiraffe Whole class detention is a pretty poor show. But I also understand the impulse to do it.

Not sure what this is about Belle? I don’t do whole class detentions?

Nobody "bollocked" anyone. DH just had words with the assistant head. Kids like my son (who has ASD) rely on these clubs to get them away from the loudness/busyness of the rest of the school and for it to be taken away due to some kids being arseholes seems very unfair. I'm sure the teachers do it out of the goodness of their hearts and I said I didn't blame the teachers as such I just get sick of the good kids losing out/being punished for the behaviour of others.

I can't say as I'm surprised, it seems like no change there then.

In my experience in lots of different schools (as a school nurse) a large proportion of the poor behaviour is down to having shit home lives and having had no rules/boundaries at home. I also think there's a wider problem (that is in no way down to teachers) certainly at secondary school with forcing kids who are never going to be academic into English/languages/maths classes rather than identifying practical skills and potential careers for them. Kids can't access the work and they're sick of feeling thick and useless, so they act up and disrupt everyone. They'd rather be doing something practical and would often thrive doing it, but the curriculum and education standards and expectations now seem to have a blanket one size fits all approach. We all have strengths in different areas and some of the referral units I've worked in have (in my opinion) a better approach where the kids do cooking, woodwork, gardening, mechanics etc. The kids see the relevance and enjoy being good at something they can see themselves having a future in.

@Titsywoo

With the greatest of respect ‘a quiet word’ is still putting pressure on staff to use their lunch hour for clubs.

Teacher retention is bad because of behaviour AND because parents and students seem to feel like they own our time. I am bloody sick of it.

@Titsywoo so what did you volunteer to do?

@BelleSausage - you've hit the nail on the head.

I left when I felt guilty for needing ivf (and thus missing lessons) and when parents had kicked off when I'd missed previous lessons (6 in total) for fertility clinic appointments/scans.

Fuck that. I was made to feel guilty for wanting to start a family - the very thing the profession is meant to support!

@BelleSausage - you've hit the nail on the head.

I left when I felt guilty for needing ivf (and thus missing lessons) and when parents had kicked off when I'd missed previous lessons (6 in total) for fertility clinic appointments/scans.

Fuck that. I was made to feel guilty for wanting to start a family - the very thing the profession is meant to support!

Btw- I'm not bitter (can't you tell?!)

I think most parents would be pretty appalled if they were a fly on the wall. It's not the isolated incidents of extremely bad behaviour (often by very troubled kids) which get you down. It's the low bar set for general behaviour.

Imo, the assumption that pretty much all poor behaviour is due to difficult home lives (and therefore understandable or unavoidable) is part of the problem. As is the blaming of perfectly competent teachers for kids' poor behaviour by members of SLT who don't actually teach any more and only see problem kids one-to-one when they're more biddable.

@physicskate

I had similar issues at my last school I had a miscarriage at 10 weeks and only took two days off to recover because SLT put pressure on me to come back. I essentially had the day to go to the hospital to find out the baby was gone and then the next day to cry and that was it. I had to have a further two day over the next two months because the miscarriage was incomplete and I needed medical management. They tried to make me have a HR meeting about my absence record.

And I had three sixth formers complain about missed lessons- they had been provided detailed work for each lesson I missed they just hadn’t bothered to do it.

I appreciate that but I hoped that teachers got into their profession because they want to help educate and look after kids. Clearly you think teachers are more important than the kids themselves. Not much I can say to that. I support teachers as much as I can and I rarely go to them with issues but my child's best interests have to come first for me and now the SEN budgets have clearly been cut so kids like mine lose out. Anyway we'll have to agree to disagree.

I certainly got into the profession to teach and look after kids. I loved, loved, loved running my extra curricular club. It was the most rewarding thing I did and it gave my students something really special.

I had to cancel it - I hated giving that news to the kids that came. I missed it and still do.

But workload pressures have reached such a crunch point that my own mental health was suffering to the point that I, like many of my colleagues, seriously considered crashing my car on the way to work. The exhaustion destroys me mentally and physically every single day. Absolutely everything extra has to be cut in order for me to survive. I go down to three days a week next year. It’s that or a complete breakdown.

If a governer or parent had ‘kicked off’ or had a ‘quiet word’ even about the loss of that club, god knows what that would have done to my fragile health. And I am seriously not unusual in this. My colleagues are buckling and seriously struggling. It’s a crisis and is very widespread. Children are suffering as a consequence but the answer is not to heap yet more onto teachers who are a hair’s breadth from breaking already.

I appreciate that but I hoped that teachers got into their profession because they want to help educate and look after kids.

To write this after BelleSausage and physicskate’s posts is just despicable.

Clearly you think teachers are more important than the kids themselves

Number of kids is going up, number of teachers is going down. So one should certainly treat teachers as having value rather than being expendable as currently.

I definitely think that the teachers are more important than the kids. My kids included.

Of course (most) teachers go into teaching because they want to help and educate kids.

But running a club can actually be really hard work- it's not just giving up the lunchtime (which may be your only chance that day to eat/drink/go to the toilet/speak to a supportive colleague/just have a break from being on), it's also the thought and planning that goes into a club being good, and the extra shit that comes with it. I know of a science teacher who received a complaint for doing a dissection in science club and it had "upset" a child. All the children knew what was going to happen and were told they could leave at any time.

I did my PGCE this year- and one of my placements was in a school with a good local reputation, but I honestly think parents would be shocked at the level of disruption and lack of respect from students. I think about 5-10 minutes of every lesson (on average) was lost to dealing with disruption- and that adds up over a term or a year. A lot of schools in the area have moved towards ready to learn type systems- often there's resistance from parents, but it does make a difference to behaviour, and so ultimately helps the students learn.

I got a bollocking by a parent the other day complaining about poor behaviour in school and in the next breath a complete bollocking because they had been called in to discuss their child’s poor behaviour. It’s never their child, you understand.

@Titsywoo

You obviously have no respect for staff. I’ve just told you all how I was forced to teach while miscarrying my baby. I was in the classroom teaching five lessons a day while bleeding into my pants.

Don’t talk to me about putting the kids first. There has to be a line. We aren’t slaves to the kids. Everyone who works is legally allowed a lunch break I usually use mine to eat my lunch by printing lesson resources, doing data entry and (of my own choice) doing clubs. All of these things are for the kids. I spend hours at the weekend marking and sending my DH off with DD so I can have the time to do that. Again, putting other people’s children before my own. On parent’s evenings I am back too late to see my daughter before she goes to bed.

You.Know.Nothing

I too am ashamed to say I went in during a miscarriage... still bleeding. There was a required practical ordered for that day...

Probably why I felt like I was entitled to a bit of give with the fertility clinic appointments, as a d always tried to put the kids first.

But there gets to a point where, if you can't take care and f yourself, you definitely can't take care of anyone else!!

"Abuse: verbal and physical abuse, aggressive, offensive, intimidatory or disrespectful behaviour will not be tolerated." I agree teachers shouldn't tolerate this kind of behaviour but they shouldn't dish it out either!

@Titsywoo if our children shared a teacher I would definitely rank that teachers wellbeing above your child's need for a hobby hour.

In Titsywoos defence, she said that the club in question was shut because of the behaviour of some of the children attending. That's a shit reason, and yes it does punish the well behaved majority.

If the real reason that the club was shut was that the teachers were overworked or needed a break at lunch time then they should say so. Then they can look at proper solutions (our primary now brings in external organisations to run extra curricular activities, or pays willing TAs overtime to run them, and parents pay for this).

Just saw these school rules posted on twitter. The thread was at how strict and outrageous these expectations were.

Noble, every day I have kids outraged at being pulled up on those things. They are the basic requirements for learning - how on Earth are people thinking any of those are acceptable for students in a classroom to be doing?