Choice of schools.

[debih]

Schools should all be of an acceptable standard but sadly they aren't. And I'm sure its been that way all through history. Back in the old days when the village schools had one teacher - the quality of teaching all depended upon that one teacher and there would be some good schools and some bad. I don't think its anything new.

Now there are lots of factors - rubbish teachers, staff who can't cope, no budget for decent rescources and parents who do not accept responsiblity for the actions of their children.

We are fortunately - we are in the catchment area for one very good school and are also able to apply to two other very good schools that are just slightly outside our catchment area. We are not in an oversubscribed area so I think in 99% of the cases children/parents get their first choice of school.

I don't think it is right to lie to make sure your child gets into a good school but I know if push came to shove and I had to lie to get my child into a better school than the one in our catchment area, I'd have a damned good go at doing so. Most parents want the best for their children, which includes schools.

[cromwell]

It's not brilliant behaviour but as Rodo said, it has been going on for years.

Mrs C went back to her old school yesterday; one of the first things she saw was a list on the staff room notice board which said "List of children on medication".

Why the shock at the list of children on medication Cromwell?

It is medication for children with serious conditions. One child has serious problems with the digestion of food so school staff have to be trained in how to give her the medication she needs.

Perhaps I should have been more shocked that school staff have had to go on courses teaching them how to restrain violent children, considering that the oldest children in the school are seven years old.

[Workingman]

Well said Aggers.

There are no excuses as to how and why some schools come to be good, bad or indifferent, every single one of them should be acceptable, but therein lies a problem. What is deemed acceptable in education would not cut the mustard in other walks of life, and the bar needs to be raised substantially.

School performance needs to be looked at from raw data and not from "value added"; all that does is skew the results in favour of improving performance. If a secondary school gets cohorts of pupils who are regularly below a certain standard its feeder primaries should be put under the microscope, they are, after all, where education begins.

[debih]

I agree with staff having to give the child with a serious digestion problem his/her medication and being trained to do so. Without them that child probably wouldn't be able to go to school and I strongly believe that schooling should be available to all. Schools should be inclusive - a child should not be penalised because of illness, disability or their social background.

It is a sorry state of affairs that children so young are so violent but we do have to ask ourselves what society has done to them to make them this way. I don't think the blame should be put on the child - we should be looking at the reasons behind it (which are more than likely from bad parenting).

I find it so shocking that children who start school often have no social skills at all - they live on a diet of tv's and computers and don't know how to play. Four year olds are very often not toilet trained, they don't know how to use a knife and fork, nor do they know how to behave in a classroom. They don't have attention spans anymore- they are so used to fast moving computer screens, they don't need to learn how to concentrate on a task. But the child can't be blamed for that - its the parents fault.

[debih]

School performance needs to be looked at from raw data and not from "value added"; all that does is skew the results in favour of improving performance. If a secondary school gets cohorts of pupils who are regularly below a certain standard its feeder primaries should be put under the microscope, they are, after all, where education begins.

Well said Frank.

[Aggers]

That is common sense, Debih.

I can't see anything wrong with that.

[Suff]

I must admit I have a few views on this. We put our daughter to a private school, once I could afford it, because we believed the entire system locally was falling down.

Mrs S Worked in a school called Warout in Glenrothes. It is more locally known as War Zone. Pupils of the school included the almost forgotten but, at the time, infamous, Graham brothers. To be honest teachers and staff can only work with the raw material they get. If it is poor then, in many cases, the result is going to be poor. It is simply not possible to produce average results when more than half the school is below average.

Even worse is that teaching now targets the median level of the school. Because you can’t disadvantage the poor one’s by teaching to the upper level of the school. So a poor school will produce even poorer results.

Can you then blame parents for wanting to move their children? The whole mess is endemic in the way the system currently works. At least when schooling was streamed into ability groups in secondary, then the primaries could sort the abilities by teaching to a common standard and then send the children to the school which met their ability group. Now, today, everyone has to go to school based upon their location, no matter what their ability.

Is it any wonder that some children are bored out of their skulls by curriculum which doesn’t even interest them, let alone stretch them? As for those who can’t even make the low standard of the “general” curriculum? They become abusive from a constant inability to succeed.

Our children have been disserved by political correctness gone wild over several generations. Our only option? Pay for education or get the child to a better level of schooling.

As for disruption in the school? Just like the problems in the Isle of Man, the problems became very pronounced with the removal of corporal punishment. There are no sanctions any more. What can a teacher do? Tell their parents? Don’t make me laugh.

There is no way to fix this now. The system has been broken for so long that those who are trying to fix it already believe that they are doing the right thing, just in the wrong way. They are never going to accept that they are doing the wrong thing, that would mean that 40 years of teaching “advances” would have to be thrown out and they would have to go back to traditional teaching methods. Which, by the way, most modern teachers don’t like.
The best teachers I ever met completely ignored all the “advice” and “advances” and just got on with traditional teaching methods. So the government loaded them up with paperwork until it was impossible to do anything else but teach the way they wanted. With the expected fall in standards of pupils. Now they want to blame the teachers and the schools for all the bad decisions they have made of the decades.

Fortunately most parents are not as stupid as the politicians put in place to oversee our education system. So they use guile and misdirection to get their children into a school which has some chance of delivering some kind of decent education for them.

I don’t blame them at all.

[cromwell]

I agree with staff having to give the child with a serious digestion problem his/her medication and being trained to do so. Without them that child probably wouldn't be able to go to school and I strongly believe that schooling should be available to all. Schools should be inclusive - a child should not be penalised because of illness, disability or their social background.

I think schooling should be available for all too. But the danger with the inclusive approach is that imo it dilutes what school should be about, which is education. Teachers and staff now have to deal with many difficult and disturbed children. This means not only dealing with the fallout, such as disturbed children attacking other children and members of staff, but having to restrain these children and having to provide a room for them to be taken to after each outburst. Additionally staff have to be taught how to administer medicine and what to do if one child has a seizure.
Staff also have to attend many, many multi-agency meetings; not only because of children but because of their parents.
All of this has placed a largely unacknowledged extra burden on schools, not least in the demands on staff time. I don't believe that it is possible to accommodate all of these extra responsibilities without the quality of education suffering.

It is a sorry state of affairs that children so young are so violent but we do have to ask ourselves what society has done to them to make them this way. I don't think the blame should be put on the child - we should be looking at the reasons behind it (which are more than likely from bad parenting).

I don't think society has done anything to them, I would say that you are right about the bad parenting.

I find it so shocking that children who start school often have no social skills at all - they live on a diet of tv's and computers and don't know how to play. Four year olds are very often not toilet trained, they don't know how to use a knife and fork, nor do they know how to behave in a classroom. They don't have attention spans anymore- they are so used to fast moving computer screens, they don't need to learn how to concentrate on a task. But the child can't be blamed for that - its the parents fault.

Yes, it is the parents fault, but they are not the ones expected to put it right. As you know, the school has to do that. Again, they have to spend time teaching the children not only how to do their laces or put their coats on, but to use their knife and fork and in some cases even how to speak.

Schools seem increasingly where the problems of society are parked and where teachers are now part of the social services and this has to have an effect on the quality of education.

[debih]

I agree Cromwell - teachers are expected to do more than teach. And their budgets are slashed to dangerously low levels.

It infuriates me the attitude that far too many parents have - let the school sort the chikdren out. Lazy, bad parenting.

I salute anyone who enters and/or stays in the teaching profession.

[Workingman]

The simple answer to all of that is for the school's prospectus to have a clear list of what a pupil must be able to do from day one. If the child is unable to do any of those things it will be sent home and not allowed back until it can do them, or is making progress towards doing them. If the child is not back after one week social services will be informed - no 'ifs' no 'buts'.

Another thing that has to happen in primary schools, especially for reception and years 1 & 2, is that the day is tightly structured. It should start at the first bell with classes lining up and walking quietly into school, and end at the last bell with classes individually let out once they have calmed down. The rugby scrum free-for-all has to end.