A new CEO was put in place at my children’s Multi Academy Trust in 2022, and the first thing they did was a ‘fire and rehire’ round, which resulted in the schools losing a whole load of really good teaching assistants. The damage to morale and loss of teaching support led to us losing around 15 teachers in just one small secondary where the teaching staff had previously been really stable.
At the same time, they started bringing in these draconian behaviour policies with rules like you have to stand behind your chair until permitted to sit, and ‘do what an adult tells you to do, first time, every time’.
The children with special educational needs were really the ones that got hammered at that time. Some children left, while others’ attendance fell off a cliff, and their attendance has since remained very low. So the impact on families has been massive.
Pictures of school trips and children’s art work were taken off the walls and replaced with academy branded posters with nonsense slogans like ‘equality equals diversity’ and huge posters of the rules. And at the same time teachers were being instructed to read from scripts during their lessons.
And then there’s the teachers who have a tendency to be overly strict. They have become a big problem now, because they’ve been given license to behave in really quite unpleasant ways – one teacher I know singles out children for humiliation.
And the children who are most vulnerable are often from families who are hard pressed. It is harder for those families to fight or advocate for their children, so where they were already at a disadvantage, they’ve now been disadvantaged further.
We’ve been campaigning for three years now and have had some level of success in terms of media coverage and local MP involvement, but parents are exhausted and you can see there’s a kind of apathy setting in.
Or people thinking ‘well my kid’s getting on OK, and we’ll be out of there soon,’ and so it’s getting difficult to engage families.
To some degree I can say the same in that my children are just about getting on OK, but I can’t see how the culture in schools at the moment, and the culture of the leadership in particular, is good for any child.
I wonder if there’s some naivety around exactly how children are being schooled nowadays? I’ve volunteered in one of my children’s schools and I’ve seen how it is, and I just can’t believe this is how we want our children to be educated. In terms of their attitudes to other people, the lack of compassion, the lack of empathy, the lack of time to just be. It is absolutely soul-destroying, not just for the kids but teachers also.