TheParagon-Education

In the 16 years or so I’ve been a teacher, behaviour in schools is definitely getting worse. There has been an explosion of need, partly sparked by the pandemic. The lockdown broke the relationship between school and families. Suddenly, school became an optional thing.

As a result, there are more students with various extra needs coming from traumatised backgrounds than ever before. They are in mainstream normal classes with no extra provision.

When I first started teaching, it used to be that there were a few students struggling, and this meant they actually got the support they needed. But now, because of the sheer number of students with additional needs, there just isn’t enough funding. A lot of kids are playing catch-up since the pandemic with no extra support. This plays out in bad behaviour.

There are silly examples. I remember teaching a child who always used to sit in a cupboard during class. His behaviour was communicating that he had a lot of wants and needs, but we couldn’t do anything about it.

Every lesson, the class of 30 kids who had a whole range of abilities had to accept that their classmate was going to get up and go to the cupboard. I had to try and deal with it. I was in charge of his overall strategy, but we allowed that to happen because without the funding, the least disruptive thing was just to let him sit there. It was the cheapest and easiest way we could manage him. It was ridiculous.

But then you move to much trickier children. I was punched in the face by a 16-year-old student. I’m quite skinny, and he was quite big, so it wasn’t harmless. He came from a difficult background with a lot of trauma in his childhood. I was the teacher sent to support him. That was particularly difficult because he was so close to his GCSEs that the school couldn’t afford to take him out of school. So nothing happened. There were no sanctions nor consequences. No protections for me, not that I wanted them. I just kept bumping into him in the corridors as if nothing had happened.

Ignoring this sort of behaviour will become increasingly common thanks to an accountability measure known as Progress 8. Before Progress 8, schools were measured purely on attainment: the number of students who achieved five GCSEs, 10 GCSEs, or similar benchmarks. The problem with that approach is, if you’re clever kids, you get better results. If you have privileged children who are supported at home, you get better results. That doesn’t necessarily reflect how effective the school itself is.

The government’s solution to this was Progress 8, which is generally a very good system. Students are judged on the progress they make from the end of primary school to the end of secondary school. Crucially, it compares each student’s progress with the national average for pupils with a similar starting point. This allows you to judge how much value a school adds, regardless of whether pupils are high or lower-attaining.

But the problem is that Progress 8 measures progress across eight specific subjects, and students must take a particular combination of them. They must sit exams in English, maths, and science, and they also have to meet requirements across different “buckets”, such as the EBacc subjects (like humanities and languages) and certain arts or other approved courses. If a student doesn’t take GCSEs in the required eight subjects, their score counts as zero for those missing subjects, which negatively affects the school’s overall Progress 8 score.