Scenes From The Battleground

I often find myself defending what I write here, often from people who just don’t get it. It is particularly noticeable when I am told that what I see as the almost universal experience in tough schools is just a fluke, something that I must have stumbled upon that is actually very rare. Often it will be claimed that their own experience as part-time SENCO in a very challenging private Church Of England primary school in the home counties proves me wrong.

So, for the benefit of those who have never set foot in a tough secondary school classroom (or those who have but didn’t notice what was going on because they were a member of SMT), here is my list of ten things that you can’t have missed after a single term of teaching in a tough school, yet some people will still swear aren’t true:

1. Kids don’t behave just because your lesson is interesting or well-planned, or because you are nice to them.
2. Top sets, particularly in Key Stage 4, often behave badly.
3. Punishment does work on 99% of kids. If you look closely at the kids who supposedly don’t respond to being punished, it almost always turns out they haven’t actually been punished very much.
4. IEPs and other SEN information tell you nothing useful at all.
5. When SMT say “come and see me if you have a problem with that” about something they’ve told you to do, they don’t mean it.
6. Discipline has got worse since you were at school. By a factor of about 3000%.
7. The kids don’t know things that they are meant to know.
8. It is a lot easier to teach a class that has been set than a mixed ability one.
9. The paperwork cannot possibly be done. No task is worth doing until somebody reminds you to do it.
10. Some very stupid people are teachers.

Please feel free to suggest additions to the list.