School - BBC 2 - 9 pm

[HollowTalk]

Anyone watching?

It made sad viewing looking at the clip of next weeks show as well when the teacher was saying it’s time to leave , It must be so difficult to retain quality staff which adds to the uncertainty.

Yy not & star
Honestly as much as I sympathise I think they have killed it tbh

Offering those lollys turned it into a joke imo. They were what? 12/13/14 ? Like they would even care.

And once that small group of well behaved kids leave I'm not sure what kind of place the new yr 7s will be walking into.

They seek so grateful for people merely turning up they expectations of them doing anything when they get there seem almost non existant.

The three or 4 parents that bothered to show for the forum, made me wonder just how much local supoort for the school has diminished.

And I can't say I blame them.

The teachers were asked for a lot of lollipops today!

To pick up on what was said about how young some teachers are, BBC News did a feature on a Pupil Referral Unit yesterday the head teacher could not have been more than 25, and possibly less.

Presumably no one would take the job

I have to say, it's 20 years since I left school and the hardest would have laughed in your face and told you to get a life if they were told, come into school more and you'll get a lollipop, not the best idea

The reason that Headteachers and Assistant Headteachers are so young is because no one else wants to do the job.
At our local primary school it took them three years to get a permanent Headteacher
They had offered the position to existing staff, but they all refused.
The stress is unbelievable

are

Isnt that in a way setting them up to fail?

I can't imagine a young person with a failed school on their cv as their only experience of being a head would find a new job very easily.

I do feel bad for them. I do. I also think it's a shame parents and kids cabt be held more accountable for basics. We expect more in 6 hours a day half the yr than we expect of out kids and ourselves.

I'd much rather schools were in a position where they could just teach. When did parents bail out so much?

What horrified me slightly was the way the head kept extending his exclusion, which is illegal. A fixed term exclusions must, unsurprisingly, be for a fixed term.
I thought this too. Was he receiving some kind of education elsewhere? Didn't look like it!

I don't think so because he said he was very bored at home.

This is turning out to be a very interesting documentary.

Episode 1.

I believe this school (Castle) had 6 Pastoral Support workers. Now I am sure they can be very useful, but when I was at school we had 0 of these. Why are they 'necessary'? In my opinion, I would rather Teachers get paid/valued more and the pastoral support is provided by parents/carers. Are schools there to educate, or to raise your children?

Episode 2.

At one point I thought this must be a spoof. Year 7 homework for the TOP set of maths;
Question 1: "What is 7+3?".

I also agree with the parent who said "All this liberal stuff is fantastic, but you need to discipline the kids". From what I have seen, all the best schools have very rigorous rules in place. If you dont enforce them, behavior gets worse and worse and everything suffers.

Whilst I agree with you that behaviour deteriorates without firm boundaries, I really cant agree with the comments about not needing a pastoral team.

I’ve been teaching for 15 years and kids need that team more than ever. It would be lovely if all parents were kind, supportive and understanding, but it’s simply not the case. Sometimes parents are out of their depth (having never experienced the issues that they might be faced with) and they ask us for that support. Besides, we see students a lot and have a huge duty of care for them. I don’t want to pack them off home and have them think no one cares.

Where would you send a child that was having a panic attack in an exam? What would you do with a student refusing to go into a room because of bullying? How about the student that has received abusive texts overnight? We are teaching- we need the pastoral team to handle this stuff. All three of those happened at my school today. I don’t mean to be arsey, please don’t think that, I’m just so frustrated with our lack of resources to help students that are breaking under the pressures of modern life.

What we need is more money in education all round. Sadly, I don’t see that happening.

In my opinion, I would rather Teachers get paid/valued more and the pastoral support is provided by parents/carers. Are schools there to educate, or to raise your children?

This is an interesting comment. It gives away that you don’t think pastoral care is an important part of what teachers do.

What happens when parents can’t or don’t do pastoral care? What happens when an incident happens at school and children are upset? Do you ring the parents to come and sort it out? Do you make the children wait until after school to get some help dealing with it? What about those students that need extra support to manage a normal school day? Do they need to be homeschooled? Who sorts out bullying?

The head in episode 2 was a wet chip. He needs to grow a pair. And that dick head trying to bribe the kids to go to school with lollipops? What a joke!

Henry should absolutely be pulled up about his lack of uniform. Why should he be allowed to wear what he wants whilst other pupils are. Following the rules? School rules are there for ela reason. What of all pupils decided to wear what they wanted. No, I'm sorry. The teachers were absolutely right. The lack of parental support was obvious and the mother needed a good shake

What would be so dreadful about all the pupils wearing what they want? It could free up hours of teacher time to do some actual teaching.

They have a uniform policy so why is it OK for Henry to break it? Regardless of whether you think its wasting teachers time is besides the point. He was defiant and continually broke the rules. Why should he get away with it? Secondary schools prepare children for real life so when he gets a job do you think it'll be OK for him to refuse?

His aim was to be disrespectful and disruptive hed had have done that in whatever he wore.

Maybe so but he still needs to. Follow rules

Oh o agree. He was asked to hand over a hoody and he could have gone to class. He was being a pain in the arsenic the sake of it knowing full well every one was to wet to do anything.

As soon as it inconvenienced him and his mum he packed it in. Well hopefully anyway.

They should have excluded him way befire then. If he'd have disrupted those exams I can't see many of the parents being impressed. They'd have lost more kids than him that day which wouldn't have done their budget any good

Arse for

I think they had excluded before then? When his mum said she'd been in to 10+ meetings like that, I assumed she meant Re-admission meetings and took it as he'd received multiple exclusions.

She said she'd never had a meeting witg the head befire .

And he seemed reluctant to consider exclusion so I took it that they hadn't.

But not sure we will know for sure

Certainly if they had excluded several times befire it made the decision to have him back the day of the exam even more foolish and shows an absolute lack of consideration or respect for all the other kids

At our school, the head would only sit in or hold a readmission meeting if the incident was particularly serious or the child was close to a permanent exclusion.

The Henry situation seemed quite unorthodox. It seemed he'd been difficult for years and had had multiple exclusions, but unsure how he'd actually made it to Y11, and the "shall we/shall we not" approach to him returning was bizarre. If it was that close to exams I'm surprised they didn't just send him on study leave.

Pastoral teams are vital. I.was horrified that Marlwood no longer had a learning support team.

My son has ASD, anxiety and depression. He has camhs and I support him myself. But he would be unable to attend school without the pastoral and SEN teams. They have had to phone me before because he was suicidal and needed picking up. If he had no one to go to i dread to think what would happen.

I suppose years ago he would have gone to a special school and not done any GCSEs even though he's very academic and could achieve high grades.

Inclusion is very much the right policy but it needs funding properly. the govt have saved the money previously spent on special schools and are now trying to save more money at the detriment of disabled children. It's disgusting.

The gment have it so wrong. All you hear about is how they want to help. Mental health when surely targeting children in school is paramount. Instead they are left with little or no pastoral care and then failed terribly by the school whose teachers desperately want to help them.