It will be behaviour that makes me quit.

[JenniferYellowHat1980]

I can't stand it. There's a particular year group which is really hard going in my current school. I've only been there since Sept, but I have fifteen years' experience and consider myself pretty assertive, confident and to have high expectations in the classroom.

Today I've been told to fuck off. I've been called irritating. I've had two boys deliberately trying to get a rise out of me (they didn't) so they could be sent out. The verbal abuse was simply for repeatedly trying to refocus them on their work - topical and differentiated to the Nth degree.

Previously I have been sworn at and later found a note plastered in really disgusting obscenities about me. I don't actually care about that or the language - it's the arrogance of the perpetrators and the constant disruption that means the majority of hardworking, pleasant kids don't get the support and working atmosphere they need.

This is a 'good' school, by the way. The one I taught in last year, recently downgraded, was worse.

Anyone else just feel ground down by behaviour?

Sounds horrendous. But, if a parent does come to school to talk to the teacher, parents evening, etc, and does tell you, as a teacher: please tell me if she is disruptive in class, please tell me if she is any trouble, would you tell the truth?
Because sometimes I can see the reluctance to be straight, I am not fishing for praise, I just need you to tell me if she's a little shit so I can deal with her.
I don't 'speak the lingo', so something vague like: she is doing most of the work means nothing to me, or at least, not a lot.
You guys have such a hard job! Not long till the holidays though.

I'm going to be completely unhelpful and join the growing crowd of teachers who say that going private or going abroad has helped me love my job. In fact I have done both and am working in a private girls school is australia. There are a quiet a few other teachers, also from the UK. Job is great. Motivated well-behaved students (on the whole, they are still teenagers), with a much-less workload and much much better pay.

I worked for 3 years in the UK. The training year was hell obviously and then 3 years in an outstanding school. The first year was very tough there in terms of behaviour. I remember an older teacher telling me that people who came into teaching late (I was early 30s!) expected respect from the students, rather than realising that it needs to be built up. She didn't mean it in a bad way, but simply to open my eyes that you needed to be absolutely at the top of your game to be treated with respect, rather than receiving due to being a teacher, as in my days at school. Even in the outstanding school, the students had an attitude of disrespect, rudeness, choosing when to behave, bullying of weaker teachers (me!), but if you got them on side they could be great. I can't begin to imagine what you guys go through in less than "outstanding" schools.

It is truly so sad that many great teachers are leaving the profession, going abroad or going private because of behaviour. My own solution to getting a well-paid and fulfilling job as a teacher is obviously not possible for 99% of teachers.

I don't wish to get political, but I believe that there are so many roots to this other than just parental disengagement and unsupportive management: a government that is happy to blame teachers, ridiculous workload, growing separation of society, reliance on cheap unexperienced teachers at the expense of older experienced teachers, unregulated access of children to the internet. Maybe I am hybrid of the daily mail and morning star together, but I believe that this disgusting behaviour has it roots in society.

A final point: working abroad has made me realise that excellent teachers come out of the UK. The tough system for teachers seems to act as a kind of bootcamp to produce some brilliant teachers.

"Since the school has tried everything in the past to deal with being a school in difficult circumstances – learning styles, student observations, learning walks, high stakes observations, low stakes observations, interventions from 7am-9pm including on Saturdays, Mocksted, Local authority secondments, “Lazy Teaching”, and heaven knows what else, we were ignoring what Tom Bennett calls the elephant in the room. I saw my Executive Principal speak at a Teaching Leaders event where he said “schools in challenging circumstances are usually challenging because they face challenging behaviour”. I think we’d been conditioned to ignore this and try to deal with everything else while hoping behaviour got better – and really the Leadership Group should have been shaking each other and screaming the problem “It’s the behaviour of the students, stupid!”"

mrlock.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/its-the-behaviour-stupid-turning-a-tough-school-into-a-good-school/

What an interesting blog post. I would love an easy to enforce system like that. I would like even more for the students to know the expectations are school and feel they were consistent. I feel I have to give in on stuff because otherwise I'm swimming against the tide.

Anyway, for me, private sounds the way to go!

Has anyone struggling with low-level behaviour in primary school come across this report before? www.playengland.org.uk/resources/supporting-school-improvement-through-play.aspx
Is an 80% improvement in behavioural incidents good?

So, for the last year I have worked at a free school which seems to have very similar ideas about behaviour as the school outlined in the blog post. I previously worked at a local 11-18 'good' school, and behaviour there was not great. The worst thing about it was not feeling supported by management, there were many students with insanely high numbers of behaviour points logged on the system and nothing was being done about it. Incidentally, that wasn't why I left, I had assumed that that was what it was like working in secondary and expected it to be that way wherever I worked.

Then, on day three of my new job I challenged a student about wearing his hat indoors. He walked away from me, refusing to take his hat off muttering 'fuck off' under his breath. He got a three day exclusion. I couldn't believe it!

They have a card system at my school which is central to their behaviour policy. Each week every student is issued an achievement card which has a space for every lesson, registration and break. On the back is a list of behaviours for which they can lose a credit (anything from homework to uniform, off task behaviour to inappropriate behaviour is covered). At any point in the day a member of staff can take the card and log a credit loss. If the student cannot produce the card then they are issued a red card. I will come back to this later. Credit loss in lessons is also logged quickly on the card and on Sims, which means that the form tutor can monitor credit loss daily. At the end of each week the cards are taken in by the tutor. Any student who has managed to keep most of their credits in the week (lose no more than 5) gets to go home an hour early. If they have been given a red card, lost more than 5 credits, not brought an absence note or forgotten to get the card signed by a parent then they have to stay late.

If a student is set a detention then they do it the same day (as long as it is set before 2.30pm). Again, it is logged on Sims and a text message goes home. All staff supervise after school detentions on a rota system so we share the load. It is extremely difficult to get a student out of those, even if parents come in and kick off. The head feels that they have signed the home school agreement agreeing to the policy, and if they don't like it then there are other schools locally which they can move their child to.

The systems work. Management are highly visible at all times (on Friday, 3 out of my 4 lessons had a senior leader pop in to check on things- and make sure all students have their planners and cards on their desks). I can honestly say that it has transformed my life as a teacher. There are things about the job that are still stressful, and it is nowhere near perfect, but it is significantly better than other schools that I have worked in. I would struggle to move to a school that did not have such an effective policy in place.