We sent our kids to a normal, local school where they were happy. When new management took over, the rules became extreme: kids had to maintain eye contact at all times; fidgeting wasn’t allowed and kids were ‘inspected’ each morning to check their uniform and stationery was completely correct. At the same time, anything that encouraged a relationship between students and teachers was abolished.
Both our children are bright and well-behaved, but they became utterly miserable under the new rules, living in fear that they would slip up and be punished for it. One of our children then started self-harming, which escalated to incredibly dangerous levels.
The school knew what was going on, but no one seemed to care until we started posting about it on social media. At that point they gave us a call, but it felt very much like it was fuelled through them simply wanting to protect their reputation. Both kids are out of the school now, and back to themselves.
I believe this approach targets the kids that find it harder to tow the line, as a way of getting rid of them and thereby artificially boosting grades. But it’s not working. The school we left doesn’t have impressive results to boast of and even if they did, I don’t care about P8 results, I care about my kids’ wellbeing.
As an adult if you worked somewhere that was this unreasonable you’d quickly look elsewhere, but if you’re desperately unhappy in school there’s not really a way out, there’s not a lot of other options where we live.
I had multiple meetings with the school, including asking for some peer-based reviews that prove this approach to children works, but they can’t produce anything other than reports of how children’s behaviour has worsened. I have younger kids and I want them to attend their local school, but if this doesn’t change we may home-school, which is something we’d never have considered before.
Father, South West