'Well-behaved' girls 'socialising' 'challenging' boys at primary school

[Polynerd]

I just saw a casual mention on Twitter of the phenomenon of well-behaved girls being sat next to challenging boys to 'socialise' them. I was totally shocked because I suddenly realised that my youngest (going into Y2) has mentioned to me that this had happened to her. Is this something that happens regularly? Should I be talking to next year's teacher about this? I don't want my six-year-old daughter thinking it is her responsibility to make a load of six-year-old boys conform to classroom behavioural standards.

Yes it does happen, the 'naughty boy' in my DD year 6 class was put on her table as they were all well behaved.

He said some truly awful things to her, sabotaged her work and she often cried over him.

I went into school and the teacher said she'd 'sort' it. Her way of sorting it meant moving my daughter off the table so she thought she'd done something wrong, and the boy just picked on the next kid and made her school day hell to!

It's not a new phenomenon. I'm 32 and in my last year of primary school I was put next to the most badly behaved boy in the school year. I remember doing all of the work when we had to work in pairs. I imagine that's very common.

Happens to my DD (10) all the time, which is why I'm thinking of sending her to a girls secondary school. On my more charitable days I think about it as widening her social sphere, and she is on good terms with a look of the 'naughty' boys but it does piss her (and me) off.

We had this problem at my older DDs primary school.

In her class, the best behaved children were all hard working, studious polite girls. In the class there were a number of disruptive boys ( kicking cats, throwing snowballs with stones in, hacking into other children's IT passwords etc).

Both in class and particularly on school trips the more mature girls were not allowed to sit with their friends on the coach etc. They were paired with a more challenging boy to police him for the day. In the end my DD started to say she didn't want to go on school trips as she didn't want to look after X boy, but she had to because it was her job.

I was shocked as I hadn't realised the extent of the policy and said that it most certainly was not her responsibility in school (or life) to try and contain badly behaved boys. With encouragement, she and her friends raised the matter with the teachers and the girls were allowed to be paired with their ( well behaved) girlfriend on the next school trip.

I do worry that the pattern had been going on for too long and it laid down a message that badly behaved men are DDs responsibility. Certainly now at Uni she often ends up leading her friends in getting the vomiting male students back to halls and has cleared up their vomit. So perhaps a precedent was set.

Im in my 30s and this happened to me! And when I protested not being able to sit next to my friend my teacher said that was racist. Bitch. Particuarly as she was the one acting on her internalised misogyny at the time.

Meant to say that this is probably why it is said that girls do best at girls schools and boys do best at mixed!

In a secondary school that I worked in, a young man with a lot of problems (learning issues, very difficult family life, challenging behaviour, prone to violent outbursts and exclusions) started going out with a girl who the senior managment team deemed to be a good influence. As soon as management became aware of it they utterly exploited that girl to the extent that when the lad was kicking off, they would go and take the girl out of her lesson to go and calm him down. At one point, when she'd had enough and wanted to split up, they organised mediation meetings in school to help them work out their problems and stay together. Basically encouraging her to stay in a relationship that was damaging to her.
Fucking awful behaviour. I complained a lot, which achieved nothing, and left the school as soon as I could.

Surprised you are surprised. It's been going on for years. Particularly utilising girls in this way.

Happens with boys too:
I complained to ds2's teacher after a number of instances, that I basically said that I simply refused to have ds2 sitting next to that boy anymore.

Is it just about girls though. My well behaved son is always sat next to and paired with more boisterous children. Sometimes it doesn’t bother him and sometimes it has so I have mentioned issues if there are any. I think it’s generally a tactic to help less well behaved children behave. Not girls helping boys as such

I got sat next to the naughtiest boy in the school. I still know him, and his own son is in a PRU - where he should have been himself.

I wasn't the best behaved girl in the class. I was well behaved but I was LOUD and could be quite aggressive when I got angry. I regularly lost my temper and beat him (for an 8 year old) quite severely.

It's not the way to do it. It's damaging bother for the carer child and the caree. I used to feel bad after hitting this boy when he pissed me off but he was SO ANNOYING and nothing was done. Hitting him seemed to make him leave me alone for a few minutes. He had his revenge in year six - he focused for a whole 30 minutes and spent his lunch break gathering insects in a sandwich bag, then when we were in the queue to go in, he tipped the lost down the back of my dress!

Bizarrely he is now both huge and very pleased to see me whenever we meet.

I’m 43 and I distinctly remember this happening to me in the second year of juniors. We actually got on very well! To be fair I think it did work for him, and I just got on with stuff as usual.

However from the age of 11 I attended single sex schools - it might have been more disruptive later on

Clearly there are lots of cases where this is not a good idea and it's the result of lazy teaching but in some cases it can work. DD1 is very bright and motivated, she's also confident and popular and is a self identifying tomboy (i.e. she's sporty) so gets on well with all the boys. There have definitely been times when they do mixed group work where she's been put with 'naughty' boys to focus them a bit more but I think it's better she's the child that is used rather than a quieter one. We're at a good school though and they do a lot of differentiated teaching as well so I'm not concerned about her being held back. If they were to use DD2 in the same way (she's quieter and less confident) I'd be much more of a tiger mum about it.

It not just about behaviour either. The idea promoted for years has been that mixed ability sets bring the general standard up, because the brighter ones help the ones who aren't so good up.

This is about using the brighter kids to teach the class whilst the teacher was there for crowd control. The result is the smarter kids suffer because they are distracted from their work and aren't ever stretched because their additional time is used on other kids and the teacher is too busy to actually teach.

I've always been of the opinion that it's just a way to avoid paying for the teachers that are needed to give difficult kids the appropriate teacher pupil ratio.

My personal experience was a seated with a girl with disabilities and expected to some of her work and assist her when she was struggling. She took the piss and said she couldn't do things in my class which she managed just fine in other classes by herself.

I complained to the teacher and was told I was bullying this girl by refusing to do what she told me because she was disabled! My parents ended up getting involved but I suffered because a group of this girls friends (who weren't in the class) took it upon themselves to get involved and sided with the teacher and this girl.

I lost a lot of confidence as a result. Being assertive didn't work out well for me.

This happened to me at school and both my son and my daughter (well behaved and conscientious) have usually had difficult children put next to them.

I tell them to ignore and not engage with any disruptive behaviour. They are in no way responsible for the other person’s work or behaviour.

I can live with them being placed next to my kids (they have to sit somewhere) but I’d be furious if any teacher ever told them that the misbehaving child was “their responsibility”.

Happened all the time at school (plus of course, lining up boy/girl/boy/girl)

I think that yes, if done thoughtfully it can work, but the trouble is that if it's not done well, then the results can be awful - and not just for the 'sensible' one of the pair - DS1's confidence and happiness was taken to rock bottom when he was paired with another pupil because he talked too much, and had bad hand writing - the teacher and pupil together tag-team brow-beat him until he was an absolute shadow of his previous engaged and confident self (he bounced back after I had him moved)

Oh, I forgot the positive example - at his previous school, DS1 had been the youngest, and he ended up paired with the biggest kid in the year, who was fairly rambunctious (but lovely) - DS1 isn't like that, but he's good at enforcing boundaries, and genuinely likes being around people, so the two of them got on very well - with DS1 moderating the extremes of the boy's behaviour in a kind and friendly way, and the boy having DS1's back when DS1 was finding things a bit much because he was so young.

THis happened to my second child throughout primary. It depends on how she feels about the situation. If she finds it stressful and too disruptive she should be moved. If she gets on well with the boy and he brings her positives (laughter, confidence, entertainment, lightheartedness), then it’s an equal swap.

This happened to me. And last year it happened to DD1. It resulted in the disruptive boy distracting her and kicking her chair etc.

If it happens even once this year, I’ll be straight on the phone to school. My daughters education is my priority, not her placating a child who doesn’t want to learn. I couldn’t articulate why it annoyed me so much, but this thread has helped. Yes sometimes it happens to boys too, but in my experience it is nearly always girls.

Thanks all. Going to be keeping a much closer eye on this now!

My well behaved child is often paired with more challenging children, he is a boy. I'm not always happy about it.

Most classes Ive seen try and spread the distractible children around and move the children in general around a lot so no one gets stuck next to a difficult child all day, every day, all year.

It's interesting how the dynamic of females being expected to be empathetic and accomodating of males and makes expecting the females to help them manage their emotions starts so early.

Kesstrell your post gets right to the heart of it.

Tables? Groups? Work for some pupils, some of the time, but are simply disastrous for many children.

I was in a classroom, to observe one boy, who had multiple issues.
I pointed out to his teacher that where he was sat, with his back to the board, so he had to twist in his chair to see the board, that plus an obstacle in his way meant that only one side of the board was visible to him. I'd have lost attention and motivation , and failed to take in instructions, if I'd been sat where that child was.
Teacher's answer? Shrug. He'll have to cope , because that's what we have to do. Current orthodoxy has decreed, that's how children sit.

Yeah this happens alot.dd has been on the "rota" before.

If it worked they wouldn't still have been doing it in yr 6...

Thought doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome was the very definition of insanity....

Common practice sixty years ago

It was. I remember in our High School, my class were gathered together one morning and told that another girl was joining us. We were asked to be nice to her and not to let her disrupt us. All fair and good, except she was the teenager from hell, the 'cock of the girls' in school and we were all scared shitless of her.

The first few weeks were hell for us quieter girls, every time she spoke to us we almost cried! It was a real fear of her. However, gradually she did settle down, stopped being disruptive and went on to take her O Levels. I saw her a few times after we left school round and about, she was ok. The rest of us achieved as we were expected to.

I don't know if I agree that younger children should be expected to police their peers. On the other hand kids are brilliant, if they know an adult needs them to help, they are usually pretty eager to please. And in this age of austerity and not enough teachers to go round, we have to work with what we have. Unless we have enough money for private education.

From a different view point to many expressed here, sitting a ‘difficult’ child with a well behaved one may not be so as to use the child as unpaid labour (....), it may be so that the children can learn from each other. Goodness, some children have such difficult upbringings and don’t learn all social norms at home. It won’t help them- or society- to be sat in a corner away from all the well brought up children. At my school we always mix social groups, behaviour and ability.

Polite and bright children are pretty popular and highly regarded at my school and often children labelled troublemakers learn to apply themselves from working alongside these peers. And they learn that it can be cool to be smart and do work!

As for the group work being dismissed as mumbo jumbo... well. Not sure where to start! Speaking and listening skills (especially important in schools with lots of pupils with EAL) are developed, understanding of how they are learning (metacognition), questioning each others ideas, bouncing ideas off each others, like adults do in grown up work. Developing empathy (god forbid!).

Mixed ability groupings give everyone the opportunity to strive and do their best, not have a fixed ability mind set (I’m not good at maths, etc). Teachers obviously differentiate so some children are more supported and some are challenged further, but essentially it creates a great classroom dynamic where no one feels excluded from the best learning or like a failure aged 7 or whatever. Also, lots of research supports it as good practice in a modern classroom.
But if you want rote learning or good old fashioned schooling maybe not for you!