Colleague is driving me mad. How to address this?

[ToBeOnTheWaterfront]

For the past four years, I’ve inherited her class and every year is getting worse.

It’s a mixture of Dixification and Pinterest and it’s like hell. She has put in some big changes (like no seating plan and flexible seating) as well as allowing constant talk. If they aren’t feeling like working, they go to the ‘calm corner’ and play with sensory toys. Several have clearly done no work since last September never mind March. When they walk down the corridor, if the one at the front doesn’t want to hold the door, they shrug and say ‘I don’t want to’ and she lets them!

I then get them and have to try and sort all this crap out.

How can I raise this?! I genuinely don’t know how she has got it past SLT.

Which year groups?

Y4/5 this year.

From a secondary pov this sounds BONKERS!

Are SLT aware?

Omg, no wonder so e fo the kids we get at secondary are incapable of following basic classroom routines.
This needs escalating to slt, if they thinks its cool time for a new job.

I would pick out some concrete things to raise eg flexible seating as a starting point. Keep it focused and calm, and along the lines of “different teaching styles” rather than “x is a shit teacher”. It definitely needs to be raised and SLT need to take a stance on what is and isn’t appropriate at your school. And if they decide they like her way better then at least it’s clear and you can think about a new job!

In my experience, children are generally fairly good at understanding they do different things for different adults, so to me things like having / not having a seating plan just aren’t that big a deal as it’s easy enough to say ‘well in this class xyz’ and that’s fairly easy to establish, especially by y5/6 where you can dress it up as being ready for secondary.

The lack of progress or children not being where you would expect them to be is the harder bit to address but slt should be aware of this, surely? What monitoring / assessment do they do? If they know what is going on & are happy with it, I’m not sure what else you can do apart from establishing new routines with the class in your classroom. If they aren’t aware of it because eg she is saying children are meeting standards when they aren’t, then discussing that with slt in pupil progress meetings, with evidence / examples of work is probably the way forward.

I can completely understand how frustrated you must be feeling, and realise this is easy for me to say (!), but ultimately there is little you can do about your colleague’s practice. All you can do is focus on the children in front of you now and that’s where to throw your energy rather than being irritated at what’s going on in your colleague’s room.

Longer term could you ask to be moved around so you’re not inheriting colleague’s class each year? Paint it as wanting a new experience etc etc rather than as escaping from colleague!