The Fifty-fourth Republic - Easter holidays anyone?

[StaffRepFeistyClub]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement. Baiters, haters, goaders, and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

Do not give the staffroom password to non-staff as it attracts the wrong sort of crowd.

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation. Do not sit on the chairs and do wear a mask

My brain has just wondered if Hamlet is cooked Piglet. Good thing it's finally the holidays.

I saw favourite aunty and best granny and wondered if it was a Nigerian school. Nope, just an utterly bonkers boarding school in Dorset.

I can imagine Jacob Rees Mogg sending his girl children there.

Busily now trying to spot the piglets on the meals page but got distracted by the Cavalo Nero...

Still, having seen the cutesy stuff about birthdays it sounds a hell of a lot better than Pimlico, which bans birthday balloons and badges.

That school looks gloriously bonkers.

whispers We banned balloons too, it was getting ridiculous having them in classrooms all day. Sorry piggy!

I'd like apricot jam when I get to the top of the manners league, please

I have a friend who would have loved this school. She is state educated and quite normal and a lovely human being but/and she loves ponies, books about ponies, tea parties, pretty things and delightful manners - she is very refined.

Oh herc : spoilsports!

Badges are allowed though.

One girl had what can only be described as a balloon arch. The next day, balloons were banned.

What I can’t get my head around on that thread is the poster who went there helpfully explaining that the classrooms are in the old coach houses and you have to climb in and out of the windows to access them.

Or did I misread?!

Yes it was the matter of fact way she said it too!!

Don’t they have to do risk assessments/H&S in private schools (@StaffRepFeistyClub?)

Can you imagine the fire drill !!

Right, gels, out of the window. Mind the ponies!

piggy

@JanFebAnyMonth. everything gets run past the insurance companies. Indies are risk adverse especially given that some parents can be quite litigious or threatening that route

How bad are the table manners at that school that they have to resort to this 😂

Or did I misread?!

You did not. That thread is amazing 😂

Happy Easter all!

Have you seen this?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-56625920

It’s an article about teachers facing sexual threats in the classroom. The DfE’s response to address this is in making sure there is a focus on behaviour management in teach training, so if we’re called a cunt in the classroom it’s because we can’t control a class?

Yes. we all ned to do what behaviour hubs do, so silent corridors, kids facing the front.

There are some schools with amazingly compliant behaviour when it's all run well : kids still sexually harass teachers at them, though.

Woke to find a negative covid test result for ds. Hurrah!

This belief that all behaviour needs to be handled by teachers is so wrong. There is lots I can handle but children with attachment, semh, suffering from neglect (but apparently not neglected enough for a sw), s&l (but not seen by a therapist for more than 10mins in a year) or those who are asd (but apparently not severe enough for any funding or support), those children need more than just a teacher who is trying to juggle a whole class. Where are the specialist services? Then there are those with the parents with no boundaries, all the excuses and all the complaints...

I wonder how many of those kids sexually harassing teachers are girls. Very few I expect. We know that there's a societal issue - the Everyone's Invited website highlights this, as does the outpouring of stories of women's experiences following Sarah Everard's death.

A behaviour hub which manages pupil behaviour through escalating sanctions isn't going to fix misogyny is it? That needs a different approach.

Yes, I agree and of course my personal beef is SLTs stacked full of (often a certain type of) male. So much sexual harassment and aggressive male behaviour at student and staff level has been ignored or minimised at my school. Tbh, I don't think this government is the one to lecture us all on entitled masculinity.

A behaviour hub which manages pupil behaviour through escalating sanctions isn't going to fix misogyny is it? That needs a different approach

We’ve got a big drive at our school to tackle this.

It’s very interesting talking about literally anything to do with the way boys and girls are treated. I have a group of about 6 boys in my tutor group who are so genuinely convinced that they are hard done by - any suggestion that males (as a class) have work to do is met by immediate and overwhelming defensiveness. They become completely impossible to work with.

I’m convinced that this is where the work needs doing. Space for them to lose their sense of victimhood and then build something new - away from the girls and the more switched on boys, who shouldn’t have to deal with them acting out their feelings when they’re feeling challenged.

noble
Probably not many overtly but there is a lot of subtle (and not so subtle) inappropriate flirting-type behaviour from teenage girls to young male teachers. It's often not aggressive in nature but is it uncomfortable? Yes. Could it qualify as harassment if the teacher is unable to get it to stop? Yes.

When it comes to attitudes of racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. so many of those views bleed through from parents, social media, friends, etc. Schools cannot be the only solution to combat this. It doesn't matter how much I push the message of equality if the rest of that child's world is full of overt or covert prejudice. I've taught 11 year olds who genuinely thought that the name for a chinese takeaway was the c slur or that the corner shop is supposed to be called the p slur.