Many people who have never been teachers, and some teachers who have never taught in difficult schools have no idea how difficult it can be to get a classroom climate that is ideally suited to learning, where all pupils are trying their best to learn, and to work with the teacher and fellow pupils to do well. There are sometimes suggestions that ‘if you go in there with a good lesson plan you won’t have any trouble’, or that there are simple and straightforward strategies which will work in all contexts.
Many of the teachers interviewed argued that the presence of just a few pupils who were disaffected or ‘troubled’ created a challenging situation and judgement dilemmas for even quite experienced and accomplished teachers in terms of protecting ‘the right to learn’ for all pupils, whilst trying to persuade and cajole pupils who are posing problems to ‘join in’ with the lesson, or at least, not disrupt the learning of others.
It isn’t simple and straightforward: teacher testimony about pupil behaviour. Extracts from interviews with teachers (n=140)
Many respondents suggested that it is not easy to get a perfect classroom climate (Level 10) with any group of pupils:
‘This is not a school in desperate circumstances… we are heavily oversubscribed, parents are desperate to get their kids into the school. But within a few days of becoming a year head, I had been obliged to make several quite difficult decisions about what to do with pupils who were spoiling the lesson for other pupils by behaving badly… deliberately trying to undermine the teacher… quite blatantly breaking the basic rules of behaviour.’
Many of the teachers interviewed reported that schools were under pressure not to exclude pupils, even when they were palpably interfering with the learning of other pupils and not fully under control:
‘I am very experienced and am generally accepted by the staff as someone who is good at dealing with the kids but even I am finding it incredibly difficult to cope with the large number of pupils who are really serious cases, who are off the scale in terms of their behaviour. No one can do anything with them. It is impossible to stop them interfering with the learning of other pupils, but it appears to be just as impossible to get them alternative provision.’
‘It is a condition of working at this school that you have to face serious disruption on a daily basis, pupils screaming obscenities, refusing to comply with requests to stop appalling behaviour, threatening, spitting, swearing. Staff have to learn how to cope with it and just do their best in the circumstances. You can’t teach in the normal sense of the word, and you feel wretched for the poor kids who would like to learn but can’t… you know you are letting them down.’
‘The head is great, he leads from the front, he takes difficult classes, he is always about in the school, but he can’t stop the really difficult kids running riot. He tries to get kids excluded but it’s a real struggle, there is a lot of pressure to keep them in.’
‘There are just too many really difficult ones… the system is overloaded. The poor head is at his wits end trying to get yet another senior member of staff to “mind” a kid and keep him isolated from normal classes… yesterday there were at least six, and there just aren’t enough senior staff to just drop everything with pupils and just “mind” one pupil for the whole day.’
(For more extensive excerpts from teacher testimony, see Haydn, 2012).
The interviews with both heads and teachers suggested that to at least some extent, behaviour was an issue which affected most schools. There was only a handful of responses which indicated that behaviour was not a problem, although there were many who suggested that it was not a usually a major problem, and that on the whole, classroom climate was generally good and that pupils were generally quite well behaved.
However, most respondents acknowledged that there were at least some pupils who presented a significant challenge to sustaining a classroom climate ideally suited to learning, and that both teachers and heads sometimes had to make quite difficult decisions reconciling the tension between maintaining a classroom climate that was ideally conducive to learning and yet keeping all pupils in the room.
Heads talked about these tensions, and the complexities involved in adopting a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to the problems posed by difficult pupils:
‘The school has a responsibility for every pupil that it takes on roll to give the best education possible for every pupil who is on roll. You have got to do your best for all of them. You can’t just kick out all the ones who are not perfect pupils and claim that you are running a good school. You’re actually evading the challenge of being a good school.’
‘You can’t have zero tolerance, we’d be putting out about half the kids who come here.’
‘A friend got her son into a “good” comprehensive school and said to me, (head of a school in Special Measures), “There’s no bullying there, if there is any bullying, they get excluded”. And I thought, yes, they get sent to a school like ours. They have to go to a school somewhere… it’s not a fair contest.’
‘I’ve got a kid 8 weeks away from his GCSE exams and a parent wants him excluding because of a fight with their son. There are some difficult decisions to make; it’s not black and white, clear cut. Sometimes a pupil with a record of difficult behaviour is not clearly and obviously to blame for an incident… it might have been an incident with a pupil who has an even worse disciplinary record. Can I deal with it by some form of internal exclusion… what if there’s another incident…. Do I think about what is the right thing to do ethically and morally… about what the staff think. About what particular middle class parents think… about what it will look like in the papers if there is another, more serious incident… do I just look to protect my own position rather than what is best for a disadvantaged pupil who has been making good progress overall in difficult circumstances?’
Teachers also expressed concerns about how best to cope with the challenge of keeping all pupils in the classroom:
‘I’m a senior member of staff, I’m very experienced and I am supposed to be good at managing pupils and classes – it’s supposed to be one of my strengths. And yet I’ve got a year 7 class where I’ve got to plan the lesson around control… get their heads down, get them writing, punish someone early in the lesson to send out a message.’
‘Even here there are classes where I can’t do what I would like to do with classes. There are times when I have to get the text books out and get them writing because some pupils are messing around. It’s tragic really because there are lots of kids who do want to learn, it’s very unfortunate.’
‘So many lessons get spoiled by low level disruption, even for experienced teachers. You feel drained by the effort of keeping on top of them and guilty because you know that there are lots of kids who just want to learn.’
Although heads acknowledged that some colleagues were more adroit than others in dealing with difficult pupils, several heads and teachers were keen to make the point that deficits in class climate could not be explained simply in terms of poor teaching, and that even very accomplished and experienced teachers sometimes struggled to get to ‘level 10’ with all their teaching groups in schools which had substantial numbers of difficult pupils.
What qualities were thought to be important in terms of becoming good at managing pupil behaviour?
(And should we call them ‘qualities’ -with the possible inference that they are ‘innate’ , and perhaps reinforcing the idea that being good at this stuff is in some way ‘genetic’, or should we think of them as ‘attributes’ which can be honed and developed?)
There were differing views on this and it is perhaps important to keep in mind that many teachers think that there are different ways of being good at managing pupil behaviour – teachers have different styles and strategies for managing the challenges of pupils who misbehave in lessons. In a keynote address at a Behaviour to Learn Conference, Professor Julian Elliott has argued that it’s wrong to think that it’s either that you believe in being strict and austere (‘Don’t smile before Christmas’) -and that’s what works, or that it’s ‘just’ about establishing warm, positive relationships with pupils (talk in a friendly and welcoming manner to them as they come into the class). There are teachers of both types who do well with behaviour, what matters, Elliott argues, is how skilfully, and with what degree of determination, you pursue these strategies. Having said that, a lot of respondents mentioned perseverance, quickness to learn from others, and good skills of interaction with pupils as being markers of student teachers who became good at managing classes.
One AST (Advanced Skills Teacher) told me, ‘Well I’m an AST… I’m not saying that that means that I’m superman but it’s reasonable to say that there are some who struggle even more than I do and I go down to about level 4 with some groups.’ A Head of Department said ‘A good, experienced teacher can go in there with a really well-planned lesson, execute it skilfully, in a way that engages most of the pupils, and you will still get some kids who will mess about, who will try and aggravate the teacher, who will try and spoil the lesson.’
One sentiment which was expressed by the overwhelming majority of respondents was the acknowledgement that the current system did not distribute difficult pupils evenly across schools, and this had an influence on both behaviour levels and pupil attainment. Just one example is given here:
‘It’s difficult to do this job without thinking how unfair the system is. I’ve worked in several schools and it’s so obviously not a fair contest. I used to work in an inner city school with a lot of difficult kids. The staff were great, a lot of them were fantastic teachers. My exam results there weren’t great… now I work at a much easier school and I get a lot of praise for my exam results. I’m the same teacher.’
A key message from the research was that many teachers stressed that it is not easy to get to ‘Level 10’ with every class’, and that it often takes time to create a relationship with a class where every pupil is keen to learn, and to work with the teacher, and with other pupils, to do their best to do well in the subject. ‘Level 10’ is not a natural default position and in many schools and teaching groups, it takes considerable skill, determination and resourcefulness to get to Level 10, where you can just go in and enjoy your teaching, and not have to worry about control issues.
McInerney’s ‘How I Survived the First Year of Teaching’
An eloquent piece of prose by Laura McInerney, a winner of the ‘Teach First Excellence Award’ also supports the view that it is unhelpful to suggest that it is simple and straightforward to get a perfect classroom climate with any group of pupils at any school: ‘How I Survived the First Year of Teaching’: online at http://bit.ly/1o6P2Uu.
To what extent is behaviour a problem in English schools?
Although in 2012, Ofsted and DfE reported that behaviour was satisfactory or better in a majority of secondary schools, David Bell, Head of Ofsted in 2005, suggested that there were few schools that were free from low-level disruption caused by a minority of pupils:
‘All schools to a greater or lesser extent, even if they are otherwise orderly or successful, have to deal with a number of pupils who cause disruption. You can have relatively small numbers of pupils having quite a substantial and disproportionate effect on the others.’ (Quoted in The Times, 3 February, 2005)
This echoes earlier findings from a survey of over 10,000 pupils in the Midlands. Barber (1994) found that 25% of pupils acknowledged behaving badly, sometimes or often, and 33% said that they encountered disruption on a daily basis. Barber warned that a disruptive minority of 10 to 15% of pupils was seriously undermining the quality of education for as many as half of all secondary school pupils.
My interviews with teachers from over 100 schools suggested that a) behaviour problems were quite prevalent in English schools b) the extent to which behaviour was a problem varied significantly between schools, and c) variations were influenced to a significant effect by differences in school intake and could not be ascribed simply to ‘ good or bad teaching’, or ‘good or bad leadership. The following extracts from teacher testimony attempt to illustrate these points:
‘It’s a really big problem… and we’re not a school in desperate straights… we don’t have an exceptionally large number of difficult pupils… we are rural, in the 50s for 5 A-Cs at GCSE and could be in the 60s… but discipline is a big issue for us. I’m an experienced teacher and I find it difficult to get the working atmosphere as it should be with some groups. We have some pupils now that, if I’m being honest, we are at a loss to know what to do with, in terms of keeping them in school, which we try hard to do, and yet not let them spoil the learning of others.’ (Assistant Head)
Teachers frequently expressed frustration as not being able to stop some pupils spoiling the learning of others and admitted that they had some classes which they did not enjoy teaching:
‘Even here there are classes where I can’t do what I would like to do with classes. There are times when I have to get the text books out and get them writing because some pupils are messing around. It’s tragic really because there are lots of kids who do want to learn, it’s very unfortunate. It’s not just me, there are teachers who have been here for years who have to do the same things.’ (NQT)
‘This could be a fantastic school… the fabric of the building was terrible and now it’s a pleasure to work in but so many lessons get spoiled by low level disruption, even for experienced teachers. You feel drained by the effort of keeping on top of them and guilty because you know that there are lots of kids who just want to learn.’ (Experienced teacher)
‘Pupil behaviour is the main problem.. not just in our school… it was in my last school as well. When you meet colleagues from other schools and talk about things in general it’s a problem that comes up all the time, probably more than was the case a few years ago.’ (Experienced teacher)
It’s not just about low level disruption
Official enquiries into discipline in schools (Elton, 1989, DfEE, 1993, Steer, 2005) have all given the impression that serious incidents of disruption in schools are rare and that the most common and pressing problem relating to classroom climate is persistent low level disruption in classrooms. The interviews with teachers suggest that this position may have been overstated, and that there may be quite a number of schools where disruption frequently goes beyond anything that might be construed as ‘low level’. A lot of schools have to work with pupils who are very challenging and who sometimes go beyond ‘calling out’, fidgeting, not paying attention, getting out of their seats without permission etc. Many experienced and successful teachers, including Assistant Heads and Advanced Skills Teachers talked of working at some of the lower levels on the scale with some of their teaching groups, having to deal with serious incidents quite frequently, having to deal with children whose behaviour was quite extreme, and being under pressure not to exclude pupils whose behaviour was clearly interfering with the learning of other pupils. A small selection of such comments is given below:
‘We had 3 fights in the corridor outside my room this week… one kid had broken ribs. Trying to carry on teaching your ‘A’ level group and sort all that out…’ (Fifth year of teaching)
‘The impact he’s had on other kids is phenomenal. Within ten seconds of going into X’s classroom, he’d thrown a chair at someone and kicked a cupboard in.’ (Head of Department)
‘I remember a colleague saying that if such and such a kid was in, he would rather keep his son off school for the day.’ (Head of Department)
‘For most of the week we had a pupils join the school from the unit at X school. He just completely disrupted every lesson he went in. It wasn’t doing him any favours and it was ruining the education of lots of other pupils.’ (NQT)
‘We have some kids who pretty much do as they like. They just go to the lessons they enjoy, where they’re with their mates and drift off for parts of the day. If you send them out they will just wander off, I dread to think what they get up to. We do get cheesed off about what these kids have to do to get excluded.’ (NQT)
‘The whole issue of the minority undermining the education of the majority is crucially important to parents and teachers but schools… or rather some schools… are being forced to take pupils that they are just not equipped to cope with.’ (Head Teacher)
‘Well I’m an AST… I’m not saying that that means that I’m superman but it’s reasonable to say that there are some who struggle even more than I do and I go down to about level 4 with some groups.’ (Advanced Skills Teacher)
‘I am very experienced and am accepted generally by the staff as someone who is good at dealing with the kids but even I am finding it incredibly difficult to cope with the large numbers of pupils who are really serious cases, who are off the scale in terms of their behaviour. No one can do anything with them. It is impossible to stop them interfering with the learning of other pupils, but it appears to be just as impossible to get them alternative provision.’ (Advanced Skills Teacher)
‘It is a condition of life in this school that you have to face serious disruption on a daily basis, pupils screaming obscenities, refusing to comply with requests to stop appalling behaviour, threatening, spitting, swearing. Staff have to learn how to cope with it and just do their best in the circumstances. You can’t teach in the normal sense of the word, and you feel wretched for the poor kids who would like to learn but can’t, you know you are letting them down.’ (Assistant Head)
‘The head is great, he leads from the front, he takes difficult classes, he is always about in the school, but he can’t stop the really difficult kids running riot. He tries his best to get kids excluded, but it’s real struggle, there is a lot of pressure to keep them in.’ (Head of Department)
‘There are just too many really difficult ones; the system is overwhelmed. The poor head is at his wits’ end trying to get yet another senior member of staff to “mind” a kid and keep him isolated from normal classes; yesterday there were at least six, and there just aren’t enough senior staff to just drop everything with pupils and “mind” one pupil for the whole day.’ (Advanced Skills Teacher)
‘We are under pressure from the LEA to keep pupils in, there is sometimes a clear hint that if the number of exclusions rises, this might trigger an Ofsted inspection.’ (Head of Department)
‘It’s not just calling out, speaking out of turn or when the teacher is talking…. One child came into the room and bit someone… in a matter of fact sort of way I sometimes have to look under the desk to see if a pupil might be lurking there at the end of a lesson.’ (Head of Department)
‘Not a level playing field’
Teacher responses suggested that there were massive variations in the degree of challenge which trainees and NQTs would face when they started teaching in schools, and large numbers of schools where pupil behaviour was an issue which would have a major influence on teachers’ planning for learning in the classroom. There were also major differences in schools’ policies on excluding pupils, arrangements for ‘internal exclusion’, and sending pupils out of the classroom.
What are the implications of these findings for beginning teachers and how should they react to these inconsistencies and variations? First, The reality is that if you are a teacher starting to teach in British secondary schools, you will probably have to deal with some pupils who do not want to learn, and who may try to disrupt the lesson and interfere with the learning of others. The severity and scale of this problem, and the numbers of potentially disruptive pupils will vary between schools, but it is part of being a teacher in the UK, it goes with the job, and learning to cope with these pupils is an important part of being or becoming a good teacher.
Second, trainee teachers need to have good self-awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in this area, and of their ‘tolerance’ and resilience levels. Teacher educators often talk of ‘good-fit’ placements, where the school suits the particular profile of the trainee, even though both might have some flaws. There is always a danger that trainees might be tempted to accept a teaching post because of commuting, or similar convenience considerations, rather than one that suits their particular abilities. Trainees need to have a sense of what they will be able to cope with in their NQT year and whether or not they are well suited to working ‘at the sharp end’. This came through in the responses of head teachers as well as less experienced teachers:
‘We have a broad spread here, lots of bright well motivated kids, some less able ones, a few very difficult ones, and that’s the sort of school I feel comfortable working in. I never wanted to work in the independent sector for philosophical reasons, but I know I could not work in schools which have massive numbers of disaffected and disruptive pupils so that even good teachers can’t teach effectively and make the difference that they can to children’s lives here.’ (Head Teacher)
‘I’m an experienced teacher, I’ve been at the school for a long time which makes things easier for me than many other teachers of my school and I would say there aren’t that many classrooms in the school where the levels are at 9 and 10. I’ve found a big difference between the upper and lower school. With the sixth form, it’s obviously still at level 10 and teaching is a delight, there is nothing to stand in the way of pupils learning and doing well. With years 10 and 11, I can get to levels 7 and 8, 9 if they are a good group but with my lower school classes I’m afraid the average would be between levels 5 and 7 and might go as low as level 4 with some of the more difficult sets. I really miss teaching the levels 9 and 10 classes but I’ve no regrets about getting away from the battles of working at the lower levels.’ (Experienced Head of Department)
One head acknowledged that given the large numbers of difficult pupils in the school, even the most accomplished and experienced teachers had to teach ‘defensively’ with some of their classes:
‘When you get particular groups with large numbers of difficult pupils, even good, experienced teachers are going to struggle to get complete control of the classroom… they will have to make adjustments to how they teach.’
Several senior teachers acknowledged that their situation was such that there were sometimes pupils who were not fully under the control of any adult in the building, and that the presence of such pupils was very corrosive of teacher morale:
‘It’s demoralising for staff to have kids like that. As long as staff think you are doing everything you can to get the problem resolved they generally do everything they can to help but it depends on the frequency of such cases. If it’s a rarity, it doesn’t undermine staff morale too much. Our school’s a doddle compared to some inner-city schools… it must be demoralising if every day there are some pupils who are just not under anyone’s control.’ (Head Teacher)
There was a degree of consensus that up to a certain point, deficits in classroom climate could be acceptable, could be worked with and improved over time, and not prove an insurmountable obstacle to teachers enjoying their work. However, beyond a certain point, and particularly where there was a feeling that some pupils were not fully under anyone’s control, teachers felt that it was difficult to derive any real satisfaction from the job, partly because it was not possible to teach in other than a containing and defensive way, and partly because of the awareness that some pupils were not getting the education they were entitled to.
None of the heads or teachers I interviewed believed that difficult pupils were distributed equitably across the system, and many felt that this exacerbated behaviour problems by creating a critical mass of disaffected pupil which made it almost impossible for some schools to manage. Some heads and teachers admitted that their position of being oversubscribed gave them a big advantage in dealing with disruption:
‘One big advantage of working here is that the threat of being permanently excluded from the school is a very powerful one. This school is heavily oversubscribed, it’s got a good reputation – the kids know that, not just the parents. They know that if they get kicked out of here, they will have to go to X school… in special measures, run down buildings, thought of as a dump.’ (Head of Department)
‘One of the big things we can use at this school is that we can say “If you don’t want to be here, that’s OK, that can be arranged, there are 30, 40, 50 kids who want your place… that’s not what we are looking for, it’s end of the line stuff, and our exclusions are actually very low… but it does help being in a strong position and you’ve got to use whatever weapons you’ve got.’ (Head Teacher)
Many heads and teachers expressed sympathy for schools which had to accept more than their share of difficult pupils, and felt that current systems for reporting school performance were in some ways unhelpful:
‘The suggestion that schools achieving under 25% A-Cs at GCSE should be closed down was particularly unfair. So much depends on pupil intake.’ (Head Teacher)
‘You can’t do this job… going round lots of different schools… without realising how iniquitously unfair the system is.’ (Teacher Educator)
‘The political rhetoric is still about good schools and bad schools… this enables them to put all the blame onto heads and teachers. The reality is that it is to at least some extent about difficult schools and comparatively easy schools… that is an indictment of the politicians who have created an unfair system.’ (Head Teacher)
‘League tables… only telling one story. Whether it’s measuring hospitals, universities or schools, they try to measure things … they do it badly and it creates all sorts of unfairness and harmful unintended consequences.’ (Head Teacher of a school high in the league tables)
‘Naming and shaming just means huge panic, that any aspiring parents and a lot of aspiring teachers move away from the school, creates a recruitment crisis and makes the imbalance even worse, needs lots of time and money to sort out the crisis which has been created.’ (Head Teacher)
More than one head expressed the concern that polarisation of school intakes was likely to increase rather than recede with the creation of city academies, and that this would pose problems for collaboration between schools:
‘It would be an utter disaster… a new flagship policy has to be seen to work. There is already evidence of higher exclusion rates… difficult pupils being hived off to other schools.’
What most stuck in the throats of several head teachers in interviewed was the inference in some recent media reporting (see for instance, BBC 1 News, 23 October 2005, The Times, 15 June 2005, Education Guardian, 2 May 2006) that good pupil behaviour was something that was deemed important only by independent and grammar schools and city academies, and that comprehensives were in some way not really that bothered about standards of behaviour.
Heads felt that in making public pronouncements on schools, politicians often did not pay sufficient heed of the differing contexts in which schools worked:
‘It’s not a level playing field. You get a school in special measures taking a lot of the difficult pupils in a neighbourhood being compared to an independent school… and being told they should learn from the independent sector when they are doing a heroic job in difficult circumstances.’
‘Independent schools do have more control, as well as more consistent levels of parental support… they have ultimate power over what goes on in the school, and can get rid of any pupil who does not comply with the standards and expectations laid down. It is invidious to suggest that teachers in comprehensive schools are in some way second rate.’
Teachers’ comments were also resentful of what they saw as a ‘blame culture’ for colleagues working in difficult schools. There was a strong element of ‘there but for fortune…’ in their comments and resentment of sweeping statements from politicians about the widespread failure of state secondary schools (as an example of this see for example, ‘Kelly warns coasting schools’, The Guardian, 5 July 2005). There was a strong feeling that the most important ‘variable’ in terms of school performance was pupil intake, a view echoed by Brighouse (1997), Mortimore and Whitty (1997) and (Mortimore 1999), leading figures in the school effectiveness movement. They estimated ‘school effect’ as accounting for ‘at most’ around 10% of variation in pupil performance, and were critical of politicians’ use of research into school effectiveness. In the words of Mortimore:
School effectiveness was immensely attractive to politicians… By sidelining the effect of intake, it permitted policies which focused on detail in the school and were therefore relatively cheap. And so the department for education and Ofsted were committed to hunting down failing schools and attributing their failure to the weaknesses of teachers and managers, ignoring the destructive impact of an intake which had become progressively more delinquent as the new poverty swept through the country. Whilst some schools can succeed against the odds, the possibility of them all doing so, year in year out still appears remote, given that the long-term patterning of educational inequality has been strikingly consistent throughout the history of public education in most countries…. We must beware of basing a national strategy for change on the efforts of outstanding individuals working in exceptional circumstances.’
The interviews suggested that most student s and NQTs have to work with at least some teaching groups which are not fully under their control. Many of them were however keen to stress that even within their first year of teaching, things improved substantially. This was described partly in terms of not experiencing the lower levels on the scale:
‘In my training year I would sometimes be at levels 3 and 4 of the scale, this year things probably haven’t gone lower than level 6 in the classroom. It’s in the corridors where you get the real hassle….’ (NQT)
‘Certainly in my first year I had lots of classes which were frequently in the level 5-6 category, but it is so much easier in your second year. The balance of your easy and difficult classes changes. Now I’ve just got a couple of groups that I’ve got to be on the ball with. With all the others I feel quite relaxed and in control now and it’s a great feeling when you just go in and teach and almost don’t have to think about control issues. I love the job now, I am just so glad I went into it.’ (Second year of teaching)
‘I had several classes in my first year that I dreaded teaching so much. This year, in the classroom things are pretty much OK, the kids are mostly on task, discipline is sorted. This year the trouble has been on the corridors and doing cover lessons with kids you don’t know.’ (Second year of teaching).
‘Everyone told me that it would get better with time and I didn’t really believe them, but it has, things are out of all recognition better this term. You’ve just got to hang on in there and keep trying, and after a distressingly long time lag, it starts to get better.’ (NQT in a challenging school)
‘It’s much better than at the start of the year. The early weeks were really difficult, it’s a much harder school than the ones I did my teaching placement at and lots of people advised me not to take the job. Things still aren’t perfect… it’s absolutely exhausting, you never have a quiet day, it’s a struggle to get the kids to do the work and behave but things are getting much better now and I’m starting to really enjoy it.’ (NQT in a challenging school)
‘I’ve got a tough year 10 group but they just get used to you after a while and almost leave you alone. These kids would have destroyed me last year when I was on teaching placement. Just things like knowing their names helps.’ (NQT in a challenging school)
‘I had three kids burst into my room the other day, trying to drag a kid out with them. One of them swore at me viciously for about 5 minutes, in front of the class… a really nice year 8 class. It was quite difficult to keep calm. I don’t think I would have managed it in my first year, but I did this time.’ (Second year of teaching in a challenging school)
‘You’ve got to tell them how much easier it is in your second year… it’s miles better when you know the kids, when you’ve started afresh with some new classes and you realise how much better you’ve got. It’s still a constant struggle at this school but I’ve only had one incident this year when I’ve just wanted to run out.’ (Second year of teaching in a challenging school)
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