These conditions are going to ruin my generation

I left a school last year where the rules were so strict you’d think it was a youth correctional facility.

We were expected to move and work in complete silence during lesson time. Despite the benefits of groups working together, teamwork was disregarded as a waste of time.

During lessons we would regularly be visited by ‘senior management’. And if that sounds like a department from a large company rather than a school, well it’s no surprise as the school, like so many academies, is run very much like a business .

The senior management team’s job was to walk into a classroom at random and observe the children and the teacher. If someone was talking, whispering, even looking out of the window, they would be taken out of the class to sit in detention for more than 2 hours (yes this really happened). If you were lucky, you were given some meaningless work to do, but just as often you’d be sitting in silence doing nothing.

I was told by one of my only nice teachers that senior management were completing 2,500 class inspections per week, and only doing more as time went on.

The irony is, while we were given an entire lecture about how going to the toilet during lessons would create ’12 minutes of lost learning’, every class inspection was actually just as disruptive, if not more.

Not to mention that you if you, for instance, got caught smiling at your friend during lesson time, you could get sent to detention and lose hours of learning time. (Again – yes, that really happened).

Manipulation of power to the extreme happened at our school. I watched our vice-principal stand in front of a room of hundreds of children, and demand absolute silence. If one pen dropped, if one footstep was heard we all had to wait another 15 seconds in complete silence before she would talk.

Who can expect a room of any age of people to be completely silent in these numbers? I believe that woman used the introduction of these hardline rules to make herself feel important.

Schools that employ these tactics often claim that it’s necessary in order to achieve academic excellence. But the teaching standards were incredibly poor.

Take my GCSE English lesson – we would arrive to class only for the teacher to read word-for-word from a piece of A4 paper: “Good morning class, today’s lesson will be covering…”

He was reading from a ‘lesson script’! But if teachers are doing this – what is the point of them even being there? We could do this ourselves, at home, online.

And even for those classes where the teachers weren’t reading from a script, there is no allowance from them to use creative methods to impart their knowledge to students and get them interested in and excited about their subjects. It is simply…PowerPoint.

Ultimately my experience of school can only be described as discriminatory, and I believe that by mashing the students into one big voiceless ‘herd’, and completely disregarding the individual, it damages self-esteem. If you never speak, can never ask questions, can never work with others, how can you expect to be valued as an individual?

Add to this that children have to take extra lessons in the run-up to GCSEs, have hours of homework and barely enough time for eight hours’ sleep and it’s no wonder they are so stressed, anxious, and sometimes unsupported in a busy house of people with their own problems. 

All this should be a clear sign that our education system has failed spectacularly – and these conditions are going to ruin my generation.

Former student, 17, South West