Teachers, is this behavior normal in your school?

[CheekyBuggersIsPuttingItPolitely]

My DC have attended the same secondary school.

All three have been shocked by the behavior of their peers. Fighting in hallways, smoking in toilets, children walking out of lessons, laughing in the faces of teachers and general disruptive behavior.

My older two have coped well with the disruption, with Dd1 getting great GCSE results, she has however decided to take A Levels elsewhere.

My youngest however is finding it hard, she gets very stressed when people misbehave and is complaining she hasn't actually learnt anything yet in her first weeks at school as the teachers are having to spend the whole lesson disciplining children.

Do you think this is the norm, or are my children at a particularly challenging school?

For example, some days in a year 2 class, 2 children take up 50% of adult time.

Grammar schools are not the answer to disruptive pupils.

Why should my hardworking but struggling child have to put up with bad behaviour any more than your bright kid? In fact your bright kid can probably cope better with some disruption around them than my DD could.

Appropriate level teaching.
Appropriate behaviour policies.
Activities to help engagement.
Better funding for SEN.

The issues are Ineffective and weak SLT

I know I've only quoted part of your post @cansu but I wanted to emphasise how much I agree with this as a major factor. Our local Secondary Modern used to be a school which parents avoided like the plague – disruption, fights (even including a stabbing) and quite a hostile environment generally.

Then it got one of those super heads who took a zero tolerance approach to bad behaviour but at the same time gave out lots of praise and positive messages for good behaviour. She smartened up the uniform, encouraged pupils to take pride in the school, introduced awards not for achievement but for effort, improvement and behaviour etc. A decade on, the school is over-subscribed and has a completely different vibe to it.

@ILoveAllRainbowsx
we have two grammars near us. The boys has a culture of bullying. Low level physical and high level verbal. There is masses of disruption from those whose parents forced them to take 11plus, trouble on the buses (drugs, vaping, porn watching, bullying of younger pupils) and lots of parental dissatisfaction. Tons of drugs amongst older ones, incidents of taking E’s in lessons. I know a fair few parents who have pulled their children out.
At the girls grammar there is little disruption but lots and LOTS of self harm, prescription drugs and eating disorders. Also know lots of parents who have removed theirs children.

how do you explain this in the context of your opinion that all grammars are better and are therefore the answer?

The problem with grammar schools is that 10 is too young an age to be making irrevocable decisions about a child's educational path.

They take a single, non-curriculum-based test on a set day at the start of Y6 and that determines the rest of their schooling? It's a pretty rubbish system. All the pedagogic research indicates that educational achievement is not linear – children experience peaks and troughs depending on a wide range of factors including home life situation, how much support they get, the quality of the teaching, their style of learning, the type of exams they may or may not be good at, the number (and type) of subjects they study etc etc.

Creaming off 25-30% of DCs might, possibly, benefit that cohort but it will be at the cost of a less good education for the other 70-75%.

Yes sounds like when i was at school it happened, but then worse from what my dc tell me
Schools / teachers have zero powers now as well and bad behaviour always has an wxcuae

@ILoveAllRainbowsx if we had lots of grammar schools, the pressure wouldn't be there. Also, anyone who wanted to learn could learn.

I disagree. More grammar schools (where? in areas who already have them, or areas who are free of them?) doesn't miraculously help those who want to learn but aren't academic.

Surely the thing to do would be to

• abolish all grammar schools, and make sure that all the comprehensives are well run with robust behaviour policies (like 100s are up and down the country).
• increase funding in general for education, and for SEN in particular
• have extra funding for PRUs / interventions for the disengaged.

Why should my child have to suffer bad behaviour just because she isn't very clever but your child gets to escape his because aged 10 they could pass a test?

You can't blame inexperienced teachers either , experienced ones have left as they see the current behaviour and the lack of ability to do anything about it
If ai had a pound for all the oarents in my area who laugh about school behaviour or tell school its there issue , or worse still race down school to protect little johnny who has just been a brat , I would be rich
Even on here you read why did you take your phone of dc for misbehaving at school they already had behaviour points ?
Schools need parents to back them as well and society needs to learn more respect

@surreygirl1987 yes because its well known private school children never misbehave or bully ??!!!

Maybe more parents being held accountable for their kids behaviour would be a start in general
I see the ones around here who are left to their own devices , out of sight out of mind and not bothering them
Police who take them home as they are misbehaving who then get a mouthful of the parent
Mine went to a pretty rough school but they never got into real trouble as they knew xbox privileges etc would all be gone , I knew where mine were and who with
Yes we can't be sure all the time but certain places they cannot hang out as i know what goes on there
Maybe if parents had to take some accountability it might mean some step up

My kids are at a high-achieving Scottish state secondary, regularly in the top 5 in the country. 95% of the kids are motivated and enthusiastic and have supportive and encouraging parents. We do not have grammar schools in Scotland, or Academies. (Well, we have some secondary schools called Grammar or Academy, but they are just names).

There is bad behaviour but because it is the exception rather than the norm, it's more easy to deal with. Low level disruption of the "monkey noises and pulling arms" variety isn't tolerated and the child is sent to the year head or similar. Higher level swearing / throwing things / fighting is straight to the Head and parents involved. But they can only do this because there is a relatively small number of very disruptive children. In a school where you have a class of 30 and 25 of them are disruptive, it's impossible.

I was at a school like that, a bog standard Edinburgh comprehensive where answering questions in class and doing your homework had you branded as a swot and marked you out for constant bullying. I'd say out of the 360 of us who started as a year group in S1, about 30 went on to Uni at the end of it. It wasn't the culture, wasn't expected or encouraged by the school or teachers. It was shit and I hated it and wanted so much better for my own children.

Sorry to say but it's happening more and more in state schools. I hear it from my DH every day who is a teacher in a school like this. Yes, there are also good state schools. But the bad ones are REALLY bad. The lack of respect and just general nastiness and rudeness is shocking. Schools can have behaviour policies but they are mostly ineffective, especially if the problem comes from their home life, a detention or exclusion won't help. It's a societal issue.

Yep. Normal in the schools I worked in, sadly.

The behaviour in the school I work at is absolutely terrible. There's a large core of students that rarely go to lessons but run around the corridors banging on classroom doors, setting off fire alarms and trashing the toilets. We have a team of 10 behaviour mentors whose job is to chase these students around the school and try to persuade them into class.

Teaching is rare as most lessons are a marathon session of behaviour management.

I've worked in schools for 20+ years and the behaviour has increasingly worsened, the past 3 years have been markedly worse.

Yes all grammar area and the grammar schools are similar. Being more able does not mean they are not disruptive or don't have problems.

Behaviour policies in schools can be a joke if SLT are rubbish.
I left a long term placement last week after a pupil lobbed a glue stick at another.
Not threw,lobbed. Over arm bowled with calculated force.
He was asked to move seats by HOY. After sending his peer to the medical room with a cut ear.

Fighting in hallways, - If this is a regular thing, I would say not normal. I think fights can happen even in the "naicest" of secondaries, but they are usually a very rare occurrence, not a regular thing. I'd say more than one fight since the start of term would be pretty abnormal and a bad sign.

I'd also say regular playfighting/roughhousing in corridors is a really bad sign too.

smoking in toilets, Not normal, the school should have robust policies for dealing with this. And smoke alarms!

children walking out of lessons, I would say immediately post lockdown this was quite common. I think it's improved a bit in a lot of schools, but probably still more common than it was pre-covid. Some children just didn't cope with the return to school/rules/structure and this is the fallout. This alone wouldn't concern me as such, although I'd want to know how it was dealt with. If students leaving lessons don't have somewhere safe to go, and are disrupting others, that's a major problem.

laughing in the faces of teachers - for most students this isn't normal at all. In some cases it can be a sign of SEN.

and general disruptive behavior.- I'd say low level disruption is common in a lot of schools. Serious disruption that isn't dealt with is a real problem.

BTW, for those saying grammar schools are the answer, if they're the answer at all, they're only the answer for the students who get to attend them presumably. Plenty of students in bottom/middle sets are well behaved and want to learn. Plenty of students "go off the rails" between 11 and 16.

I agree with those who say the answer is more funding for TA support, more funding so schools employ and retain experienced teachers and more funding to help students who really haven't coped with returning to school since lockdown.

Oh, and the boys grammar in the city where I grew up had a major drugs problem which boiled over into physical fights and other problems. I believe the girls grammar was and is pretty nice, but grammar really doesn't always equal good behaviour.

Our teachers report that the middle grade students did have more behavior problems than is typical for the age group. The education disruptions from Covid definitely messed with important socialization for the age group.

my own dd is a quiet studious type so we hear about the misbehavior quite a bit. She actually has ASD. It bothers her greatly.

If I thought it was an issue with her school in particular, I would move her immediately. I don’t believe it’s her school though. From what I can tell her school is actually quite good in this respect.

what you are describing op with the way your child is reacting, I would be looking to transfer, even if it meant moving.

Reminds me of my comp in 1980! The calm, hard work classes had experienced, very firm teachers who took no nonsense. The scariest teachers were female! I learnt more in their lessons than anywhere else.

The most chaotic classes were run by teachers who were 'experts' who were knowledgeable in their fields but they couldn't control classes . Ineffective threats or trying to be 'cool'.

They had random visits from a head of year, he would creep up, caught misbehaving offenders were marched out and came back with very sore hands or backsides from his cane. That curtailed the messing about. He also wore shoes with metal clips on, the sound of those in the corridors was enough to stop bed behaviour.
The craftier kids set up a watch system to make sure Mr B didn't catch them!

No they're not. I've German cousins who have passed through a variety of secondary school types and they've all done really well, including the cousin who did really poorly at school and went straight into an apprenticeship with a supermarket chain at 16. Started out stacking shelves, now manages an IKEA.

Wish I could tell you that this isn’t normal. Sadly, I’m in a ‘nice’ school and my gosh, the self entitlement from pupils is quite unbelievable. they struggle with rules, boundaries and simple tasks. It’s supposed to be phones in bags but many of them are quite simply addicted. I break up fights almost every day and have to ask pupils to leave most classes for being disruptive. Sometimes it’s crowd control and behaviour management. The paperwork is so time consuming to log it all … then management take a soft approach anyway.

Are you in Birmingham?

I've taught in a couple of schools like that.