Are teachers helpless to control their class due to endless government rules, asks TES reader Anna Woodward. Source: TES
When I was at school, a fairly average northern mining town comp, we used to stand up as the teacher whirled into the room after the bell had gone. They would expect – and get – silence before we sat down. When they were ready to begin we listened and if we didn’t we were told off. We didn’t have a code of conduct, first and second warnings, stickers, merits, postcards home for pupils who stayed in their seats and teachers didn’t fill in forms to tell each other how naughty we were.
If we misbehaved we were kept late, without advanced notice. Sometimes the whole class was kept late and shouted at at considerable length. We didn’t argue or complain about it not being fair or tell the teacher we ‘f*in hate them’. Teachers were entitled to be cross. They were the adults and we were the kids, afterall.
Nowadays I have to be in my classroom, greeting kids at the door, which means arriving before the bell; an interesting concept as I teach in five different rooms. I am not allowed to drink tea in my classroom or carry a mug in the corridor, as it is deemed ‘unprofessional’. I feel triumphant if the class manages to seat themselves within five minutes of the lesson starting, without undue wandering round the room, examining the contents of my desk, turning on my stereo or just winding each other up.
Getting them to listen to very small chunks of instructions is infuriatingly difficult despite using a broad and ever-expanding range of strategies. When someone messes about I have to fill in a lengthy electronic form on SIMS and the problem gets passed on, and often overlooked, usually well after the pupil has forgotten what they did.
We have to send letters home to notify parents and children of their detentions at least four days in advance (rising to ten during the numerous postal strikes). I don’t flounce off to the staffroom at the end of my lesson; I wait for all the dawdling children to leave and lock the door behind me so I don’t get told off by SMT for letting them trash the place.
I’ve been watching lots of dog training programmes. It seems that some dog owners have similar problems in controlling their rather overly assertive canine friends and it usually ends up being about dominance and control. At the moment, the kids are in charge; if they don’t like a teacher they can humiliate them on the internet or get their parents to sue or draw up some trumped up offence for the GTC to pontificate over.
Heads are under pressure to keep statistics rosy, so kids aren’t excluded or referred elsewhere and parents know that schools are fined an extortionate amount of money to get rid of young arsonists, thieves and youths who happily assault their teachers, without a second thought, because they were emotional!
Impotent management, a culture where control over our working conditions is minimal, rude, violent and abusive clients, long working hours with lots of added extras… Why do we – as a profession - tolerate this?
A teacher cannot (quite rightly) touch a pupil, but it appears they cannot hold pupils after school without a red-tape rigmarole, speak without anything but total respect and calm assertiveness in the face of fairly extreme provocation!
Since September I’ve been sworn at and insulted and what happened? The pupil was told by an assistant head that they jolly well mustn’t do it again! Last year I was shoved by a cross year 8 and he got sent to the isolation room for half an hour. I still have dreams about it.
Until schools regain control, take a dominant stand on chastising poor behaviour and until ‘inclusion’ caters for the majority rather than the minority of special needs pupils (whose needs are genuinely special and often too special to be incorporated into a class of unruly fourteen year olds) we will have more and more disheartened stressed out teachers leaving the profession and more and more of the silent minority of genuinely pleasant
