English schools to phase out ‘cruel’ behaviour rules as Labour plans major education changes
https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/jul/20/english-schools-to-phase-out-cruel-behaviour-rules-as-labour-plans-major-education-changes
by 457655676
19 comments
> Education leaders close to the new government say ministers are planning to change the inspection regime so that all schools are judged on whether they are properly representative of their local community
So a school in a predominantly white area could be marked down for having too many pupils from ethnic minorities? That’s an….interesting approach.
Back in the day, there were a shed-load more primary and secondary class educators that qualified and went into work with a base understanding of child psychology. Now they’re churned out on an assembly line to meet demand.
Age or even experience is not the issue – it’s the severe lack of a well rounded understanding of the process before they step into an inner-city furnace-like environment.
There’s no right way to do this. On the one hand, excluding students who are disruptive will almost certainly exacerbate their problems, but not excluding them negatively affects all the other students.
Inclusivity shouldn’t come at the expense of other children’s education.
If some children can’t function in a regular school then they should be sent to a special school or put in special classes that are equipped to deal with them.
They shouldn’t be sent to regular schools or classes because they harm the education of everyone around them. Every time theres an “inclusivity” drive it ends up turning into just letting all the troublemakers run riot while all the other kids suffer.
Some children simply can’t function in mainstream education, and those kids would benefit from being sent to a specialist school that can deal with their behavioural issues. This whole bollocks of trying to shove all the kids into one school just for the sake of it needs to stop. There’s very little tangible benefit to it, and a whole load of downsides.
God I hate this new government more and more as the days go by. A lot of these “vulnerable” students are really just psychopathic predators who make the lives of others miserable for their own enjoyment. Children don’t have a choice on if they have to go to school so schools should have a moral duty to be as violence-free as possible. Fuck Starmer.
A lot of teachers are petty, authoritarian bullies who get off on humiliating and tormenting kids because they couldn’t pass the entry requirements to join the police – I’m no fan of the Starmer regime, but this is a good move
Thing is, if you actually ask pupils if they want strict rules in their school, they always say yes, because they don’t want a small minority ruining their lessons and their future.
[deleted]
Schools are reflective of society.
Like society, about 1-2% of the kids are utter cunts. They will be cunts for life odds are. Some will go to jail, others will just infect and ruin anything they touch.
We have very limited resources available to deal with this group of cunts. As an ex-teacher, they ruin it for everyone. They bully, they steal, they lie and they cheat. They make everything worse.
One of the few tools in our arsenal is just eventually saying enough is enough and throwing them in the bin. It takes so much to get excluded, its not happening lightly and schools are already judged so heavily on their exclusion rates they try to avoid it where possible.
You cannot fix in school that 1% who are just broken. They are just human cancer.
This is all well and good as long as funding is in place to support these pupils.
Non academic students need to do more vocational study. This costs money.
Root causes of behaviour such as home life needs dealing with. This costs money.
Isolating students but still giving them education such as small groups. This costs money.
Making sure schools can support kids with SEND issues. This costs money.
Schools don’t have strict rules because they hate kids. They have them because it’s the only thing they can do which adequately meets as many needs as possible.
Clever this. Will keep me paying for private education
I’m a teacher, although admittedly I work abroad (because fuck the pay here):
I teach extremely rich kids, I’d be surprised if any of them weren’t millionaires, and in a country where that encourages an attitude where some kids don’t try, don’t learn or even act out, and are protected by their parents and can even force the hand of the school financially or politically.
That all said, I have taught a variety of classes, and I can tell you one extremely badly behaved kid can tank the entire class, and there’s very little you can do as a teacher about it, especially in the UK.
Disruptive pupils should without a doubt not be able to ruin the education of others, and if that means they get little to no quality education as a result, so be it. 29 kids should not get a significantly worse education because of one brat.
> “High use of isolation appears to be an effective tool for improving a school’s headline academic results in a short space of time, but at a very big price for every child who ends up being shut out,” he added.
What a fucking twat. He admits that excluding disruptive and often violent students benefits everyone else, **but still wants those students in class.** One can’t even call this a difference of opinion on the best way to help the most students. He’s literally advocating for hurting everyone’s education so that this small minority aren’t left behind. Some kind of demented educational communism. This guy is an evil caricature of what conservatives claim leftists want.
Why should my children suffer because other parents decided not to bother instilling any decency into their kids.
I’m all for supporting neurodivergent or struggling children, but poor behaviour without excuse should mean expulsion, frankly speaking they have been treated too lightly with suspensions and solo learning already.
This is where every government misses a trick. Schools aren’t the best all and end all of education. Far from it. A properly funded community, learning, and development sector would solve a hell of a lot of these issues.
While we’re at it, can we reform sixth form/post-secondary education? Always so much focus on schools and free university frees, getting more people to university etc but not the crucial period that actually gets you to university.
The law was reformed in 2013 that you have to be in some form of education or apprenticeship until 18 but I personally don’t feel the system has adjusted to that in all areas of the country, even good areas. There’s mega sixth form colleges that get shit loads of funding and good press but are overcrowded with students due to lack of attached sixth forms + the disruption which causes people, especially SEN students to drop out. I think it’s a quiet issue most people don’t think about.
We pretty much did exactly this here in Sweden. Now the schools are like Lord of the Flies.
Part of the problem is that schools, or more specifically the curriculum, are structured incorrectly. It may well have changed in the decades since I left the system, but I don’t really see any societal changes that would indicate it has done so in any significant way. What we should be teaching children is orders of magnitude less complex than the current curriculum. If we did things correctly there would likely be less problem students as a result owing to the reduced complexity. Additionally, teaching children the correct things would also better equip them to deal with the more complex topics many of them currently struggle with.
Most of societies problems can be reduced to the fact that the average epistemology is garbage. That should be absolutely no surprise to anyone given how our schools work. The focus of schools is to produce an economically productive entity. The wheels have fallen off before the car has crossed the start line. Producing economically viable entities does nothing but serve the capitalist elite class and society is so much more than one minute subset. It does nothing to equip people with a solid epistemology with which they can filter through whatever they encounter in life. Some people acquire this along the way but it’s by accident and not by design. The result is that we can’t agree on basic objective realities on critical concepts like for example climate change.
The other problem is that we seem to have a lack of reductionists in the most influential positions in society. The result of this is that we’re bogged down arguing about symptoms of much more fundamental problems and so we end up treating symptoms instead of addressing causes. The topic of this thread is precisely an example of that.
We need to equip children with the tools of how to think before we start attempting to inundate them with domain specific knowledge. They have no idea how to filter it properly and that tends into adulthood as being unable to perform simple rational evaluation and filtering of events and data and you arrive at a broken society which then mistakenly identifies symptoms as fundamental causes which perpetuates the charade.
Won’t this make people push for diagnosis to try and get away with misbehaving?
Also; isn’t school supposed to get you ready for life in the workplace/functioning society where there are “strict” rules. It’s something to enforce at a young age, in my opinion