What the poster above said is very true.
I do IT support in primary schools and i have seen good and bad teaching, good and bad kids and good and bad buildings.
You can have mediocre teaching staff in a school in a "posh" area and they will do well purely because the kids are generally well behaved and the parents actually take an interest and they learn well as a result.
You can also have really good teaching staff who are at thier wits end because the kids ( sorry feral rats ) they are required to teach spend most of the day fighting, punching the staff or arent even there. The parents are also known to hit the staff when they are called into school for a meeting to discuss truancy.
"ya callin me scum eh! ****** teachers! scum the lot of ye!" etc etc
If the kids in an area are feral and roam the streets in packs then what chance to normal hard working teachers have in getting them to sit down for an hour in a lesson and learn something? these kids dont know how to sit down and listen, they are actively tought to play up in class and "dont let the ******** get you down!"
A friend of my girlfriend has given up primary school teaching after 6 years as she simply cant cope with the parents. Shes been threatened dozens of times, has her tyres slashed and had a firework shoved though her letterbox. She knows exactly who did it but of course the police dont have evidence and if she makes an issue of it it just got worse. A "good" day at her school was a day where no child got injured by another.
I have seen first hand the way some of these kids behave and a lot of people simply would not believe it, spitting, clawing, trying to stab people with pencils, urinating on other kids, biting ( drawing blood ) and even being sick on school books deliberately just so they can make a scene and get out of doing any work!
No doubt someone will respond with "well the teachers arent doing their job!! control the kids or expel them!" etc etc. Well the kids know that the teaching staff cant lay a bloody finger on them for fear of being sued or losing their job, the kids are actively told by their parents to put teachers in difficult situations as part of the little war they like to play against authority.
The mere suggestion of a teacher manhandling a small child is enough to ruin a career and the parents/kids know it. And if you expel kids at the rates needed to restore order the local goverment inspector is on the case and then the staff get replaced. The teachers in some areas are simply just trying to get by from day to day without being sacked or accused of something!
I could go on about the stuff ive seen but i suspect you know already. Some kids come from families that make the classic "scum" family look like saints. The kids from some of these families CAN be nice and really do try to work hard but its literally beaten out of them over time. And dont talk to me about social services, in the areas ive worked in they dont do a thing even when there is clear evidence of abuse.
Most schools ( primary anyway ) have at least one or two members of staff who monitor possible child abuse cases and are required to notify social services of suspected cases. In ALL the schools ive worked in these staff have told me that social services simply dont give a rats ass and ignore them on a daily basis. Seems local goverment workers dont get paid enough to care and actually do their job.
Now this is just my personal experiance from working in PRIMARY schools for 5 years, god only knows what secondary schools are like in bad areas.
The government would do better to put sterilising agents in the public water supply and make people pass an exam to have the antidote to have a child
I do though agree that SOME teachers are bad and they should be fired, but generally from my own experiance its kids who are simply unteachable. If teachers were allowed to punish and act as they did years ago a lot would be done to restore order. But take way the ability to control and punish and this is exacly what happens.
Unless you actually know the state of an area in which a school is based there is no way to judge the quality of the teaching other than be a fly on the wall and watch for yourself. OFSTED inspections are generally a waste of time, the kids are often on best behavior and the staff get penty of advance warning so that the bad ones can make it look good on the day. Even a layman like me can see that the best way to inspect schools would be for OFSTED to just turn up on the day and see how things really are.
Its a bit like when blair went to that hospital for a few days and commented on the nice friendly staff and clean room and such.... because they knew he was coming! Durrrrr
/well thats my big post for the day *phew*
