I’m a Cover Supervisor and I just walked out.

[tellmesomethingtrue]

At the end of my tether. Pupils have been shouting at me, arguing with me for 3 hours straight today. I’ve told HR that I can’t cope with the final lesson and I’ve gone to sit in my car. I welcome the classes pleasantly, I am organised and the kids know me. Just because “I’m a sub” they are disrespectful and just awful. As soon as another teacher comes in to support me, the kids are fine. Today, I’ve sent 9 pupils to work elsewhere and called SLT three times. On the verge of (another) panic attack, enough is enough. I don’t think employment should be like this. Usually half the class are absolutely fine, do the right thing and work. Surely their parents would be mortified.

Not the job of the cover supervisor. As a longstanding class teacher albeit on that particular day teaching another year group, I have been told off by the head for speaking to a child who was behaving badly, because they weren't in my normal class. It turned out that the strategy was 'to not overload parents with negative information about x's behaviour.' Well 1) nobody told me and 2) that's fucking ridiculous.
If a cover supervisor was to go about contacting parents, they could get ripped to shreds by SLT.

I feel your pain… that’s why I’m no longer a cover supervisor. It’s not worth the stress

Surely the assumption about their ‘culture’ is being made based on their behaviour?
If a male/group of males is making misogynistic comments then it indicates the culture they have at home and we all know there are particular pockets of British society - from all races - where these attitudes are more likely.

Cover supervisors are certainly not allowed to contact parents !

Sadly it isn’t just CS who encounter this behaviour, it’s seasoned teachers too. They can’t ALL be unsuited to the job???

Sadly there are cultural differences in attitudes towards women and in attitudes towards teachers in general. Anyone who has taught children of Chinese, Korean, Indian, Polish or Nigerian heritage will know how seriously these families value education, and how respectful towards teachers they are. In cultures where women are segregated, disempowered and sexualised the mainly female teaching workforce are not always respected as they should be. That can sometimes include white welfare class children.

Please get a copy of Bad Therapy. Strumming makes the condition worse not better.

Unfortunately that kind of stereotyping is what leads to people shouting at hotels.

The OP wasn't making assumptions based on their race, she was commenting about negative attitudes towards women in authority for whatever reason.

Ours are! That’s the key thing - if the problem occurs in your lesson, you set the sanction and contact home. That’s all part of the students seeing you as someone who ‘owns’ the lesson, and therefore they will behave. If they just pass it back to the normal class teacher, students see them as ineffective. (As I said before, our cover supervisors are very established members of staff.)

What are you planning for Monday @tellmesomethingtrue ?

I‘m a bit out of touch and don’t know exactly what a cover supervisor is supposed to do. I used to be a supply teacher and that involved all aspects of teaching including report writing, parents evenings etc if I was there long enough. If it was only for a day or two I was expected to provide my own learning material. How does cover supervisor differ from this.

A cover supervisor doesn’t have to be a qualified teacher (although some may be). They are not required to mark or prepare lessons. They deliver what is left for them and are usually employed directly by a school to cover absences instead of paying for supply. A school of 1,500 may have up to four. Sometimes they’ll have teaching groups too but be paid at a different rate.

I phone and email home too. The email is by default and I tend to add the detail of the pupil's behaviour onto the default notification.

I'm contracted for an hour after the end of the day and go to the detentions for restorative conversations (mixed success). Our detentions are centralised in one room each night. "Fail" it and you repeat it and risk going to isolation for repeated failures.

I prefer this system to my early teaching days in the early 2000s of hosting your own or departmental, plus they're held the following day while the behaviour is fresh. As a recently qualified teacher, one school had a system so slow and beauocratic that no one could remember what detentions were for by the time they happened, and in another (alledgedly good) school the pupils would often continue their poor behaviour in detention and no system to challenge it. It was a complacent school with no systems to deal with anything off-piste.

As an employee, I've often favoured slightly "rougher" schools to more middle class ones as they tend to have better systems and support and recognise the challenges of their catchment rather than victim-blame staff struggling on shitty leftover ks3 only timetables

It's hardly surprising that pupils struggle to respect cover staff and teachers when too often SLT don't either.

Not racist. There genuinely are some cultures that specifically teach that men are superior to women. These boys then treat female teachers like shit. This is actually true.

I’ve been signed off sick. Stress and anxiety.

You’ve got it totally wrong. The refugee kids are actually really lovely.

No

Subject staff set work in a lesson plan with resources. I’m in an office with 6 others. Two of us are qualified, one is starting teacher training in September, one is studying for a masters in English and the rest are experienced unqualified teachers.
We turn up to each lesson and teach it. We are employed full time by the school and know the pupils. We can set detentions and send disruptive pupils out. We have subjects we specialise in. I’m on £24k a year. As a teacher, I’d be on £48k but I can’t make the hours work for me as I have a young family.

I’m speechless you managed to get a Gp appointment on a Friday afternoon within hours of walking out @tellmesomethingtrue !

How long have you been signed off? Because let’s be real here - on your first day back, those children will still be there and still behave exactly as they did on the morning of Friday 29th Jan

Most can't stand it for very long...

I agree.
I worked in a school that was about 85% Pakistani.
Their culture is that men rule the household, women are subservient. And they were extremely racist towards any non-Pakistani people. So as a white middle class female TA, I was fighting a losing battle.
Add in that many kids had a huge bottle of fizzy drink (1.5lt), crisps, and chocolate as their food for the day, and, yes, there were a lot of behaviour issues.
Language was also an issue. Many of the mothers did not speak English and both parents were functionally illiterate in their own language (no books in the home in any language, basic writing skills).
Fathers and those running the mosque used physical punishment on the kids, so school was the place they felt safe to really act up without fear of being hit.
Teachers had to censor what they wrote in reports after a boy came in with a broken arm - his father beat him with a cricket bat because he'd had a bad report.
Female pupils aged 14/15/15 would disappear for a couple of months- sent back to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. They might or might not return.
It's not racist to say any of this - it is factual.
I stayed for 2 years, and had started the third year when I decided that working life didn't have to be so tough and stressful. The underlying ever-present aggression was ramping up. The week after I left, a male student pulled a knife on a female member of the Senior Leadership Team... I was so relieved to be out of it.

I really hope I am wrong then and you just phrased that badly. Preconceptions like that are wrong whatever their background.

It’s true. I did supply as a youngish female in a predominantly Muslim boys’ school. They were really hateful towards me and it was difficult to give them detentions because they were allowed to go to prayers after school in the mosque. I left that job because I was offered one in Hackney, and the kids were so lovely in Hackney in comparison. They’d tell me how grateful they were for my help. They were actually the most appreciative kids I’ve ever taught.
At the time, I didn’t attribute the difference in experience to religion or culture, but with hindsight it definitely was.