Stay and stick it out or leave for promotion? Behaviour

[Elendel]

I started in a secondary school a year ago, on a TLR position. Fairly recent Ofsted, all areas pretty good. However, since I started behaviour has massively gone downhill.

Systems are inconsistent with staff not told of changes and therefore always behind the kids in knowing what (weakening) sanctions apply to what behaviour. For example, walking out of a lesson used to be a day in internal exclusion, now is barely a break time detention and kids walk out all the time. Staff have not been informed of the change and only find out when trying to apply a sanction.

This last week, I have been verbally abused and had my sanctions undermined several times by kids (lack of staff turning up for collection) and pastoral staff, who wouldn't apply the policy correctly to known repeat offenders. I also have parents kicking off because the system is so arduous many staff don't bother logging sanctions and/ or phoning parents, so that if you're the only one following policy parents think you are the issue.

I am considering my options. I have a heavily implied offer for a promoted HOD role in another school in the same trust, and I know the trust lead for my subject is confident I can easily fill the role successfully. But I only moved here a year ago and the school is close to home. This would be my second school move in 2 years, having previously worked in a promoted role in a very difficult school (but I left mainly because I'm not paid to put up with all the verbal abuse I get for applying the school policy to the letter). The other school is far further afield and I am a single parent, so have to consider childcare around the difficulty of working in a new school. The new school would also be in a very deprived area, but come with a 5k uplift in salary.

Is it worth it, or applying for any other promoted role? I know I have HOD material; I have worked in roles above that pay level and done fine (but always skirted HOD itself). I am not keen on moving again, but I have almost all bottom sets this year and it's soul-destroying, and I can't see it getting better.

Another school in the same Trust may have the same behaviour policies and attitudes to enforcing them.

You can’t change the way SLT doesn’t apply sanctions but you can change your reactions. Work out which behaviours are your top priority and apply the sanctions you can to those,

If kids walk out of a lesson try and see it as a few minutes break from their behaviour.

If after a few weeks you can’t bear the place look for another job.

Behaviour has got significantly worse since I started, and much of that is down to the head's unwillingness to see the issue. SLT in my school exclusively teach top sets or the small, easy ones if options (10 kids for Food Tech kind of sets). So there is great denial from the top that behaviour issues are rife and that may well just be down to leadership in the school rather than the trust.

The issue with only picking on my top priority behaviours is that then I, too, will be part of the reason why things aren't working. Inconsistency. Though, as I said, part of the inconsistency is down to how convoluted the system is. Take equipment - if a child has not brought their equipment twice in a row, they get a detention. But that relies on you tracking whether said child had their equipment last time, which, if you teach 10+ classes a week, can be very difficult. I have found a way of tracking this and so am applying the sanction - cue protests. This is a minor example, of course.

No one in SLT challenges me on behaviour, because they know they haven't got a leg to stand on. I apply the system as they ask. But they find ways to undermine the sanctions of their own system in other ways. By pointedly not collecting kids when mine need removing. By putting others' removals into my lessons despite some of my classes being known hotspots. By refusing internal exclusions for abuse (as the policy demands) and instead insisting I have yet another parental conversation to "build relationships".

The last time I've been in a school like this, they went straight to special measures and it took them almost 5 years to recover, bleeding staff in the process. I'm getting too old to go through that process again.

So here comes the implied job offer, with promotion to boot. But of course it comes with all the disadvantages mentioned. I could apply for the HOD role in different schools closer to home, but after 3 interviews we no longer get paid for days off for this reason and I'm quite reliant on the money.