Labelling Children

Thank you grannypiper. The very first Saturday of this new term I asked him how he found Y4 and he said "Its great Nana, my teacher smiles at us and nobody shouts at us". That teacher has thankfully left the school now.

Izabella the following is from the Bristol University Children of the Nineties Study.

Supporting Pregnancy Data we’ve collected from you and your mums suggest that your mum’s emotional state during pregnancy can have longlasting effects on you: deep anxiety or depression during pregnancy doubled the risk of emotional and behavioural problems at least until you reached thirteen years old. These findings are starting to influence Government policy to focus attention on providing lots of emotional and practical support to women during pregnancy, such as through the Family Nurse Partnership.

I hope someone carries on this research and hopefully looks at the possible hyperemesis link too.

Lyndylou not just that. Women who gave raised cortisol levels in pregnancy (usually stress induced) have children who have an increased risk of depression. I can't find the original research reference atm

Excuse the typos. iPad taking over again, but I'm sure you get the gist.

Thank you Lisalou for admitted my that your phrasing was 'wrong'. That is what has caused all this upset and your apology is accepted. Now, at least, you understand that I was not attacking you through 'snide' remarks but defending the children you inadvertently denounced, as were others who rose to defend their grandchildren

Sadly your OP seemed to attract a few who took your post to mean something other than you meant and that added fuel to the debate. You are not the victim in this but by admittedly you worded your post badly perhaps you realise how it came across.

Lyndylou How awful for your DGS to have such a bully for a teacher, my DS had such a teacher too in reception year, i dont think she liked a single child in that class, but it wasnt just the children she bullied, she was a awful woman, who believed she knew best about everything and only her opinion mattered and would shout anyone down who dared to state another point of view.
I hope you DGS continues to have a better calibre of teacher from now on.

Anya, yes i do. A report that started with a great big whopper regarding the registration and greeting of the children on the day of the inspection, which took place at 09:00, we were accused of being being unwelcoming toward the children, ignoring parents, and marking children present who were in fact absent. As the inspector booked on to our military base at 09:32 and arrived at our door at 09:38 how she could possibly have any insight in to our registration i do not know.
The inspector then reviewed in great detail an activity that did not take place that day by a member of staff that none of us knew.
The report was littered with so many lies and the personal insults were awful( saying a member of staff sounded like strangled cat) The whole report was a fantasy and we then had to be re visited and strangely enough were given outstanding.

Maybe my phrasing was unfortunate, but that is not what I meant, in case I have still not made myself clear, what I was trying to say is that there are a number of children where I wonder about the diagnosis. (Not in one class, but in several over several years) I also explained (at least I think I did) that I work very hard to help children with or without difficulties.
Oh, whatever, some clearly need somebody to beat up this week. Might as well be me.

Sorry Lisalou you need to read your OP again
*When I first started in education, it was rare to have a child in your class who had ADHD, Aspergers, ASD or any one of a ream of problems.
I wonder if anyone else feels that this appears to be a way of justifying a lazy child*
If that isn't calling children with disabilities lazy I don't know what is.
Maybe you didn't mean to say it, but that is certainly how it reads.

Izabella Last year, in my efforts to try to help my DGS, I came across an European survey about babies born to mothers who had hyperemesis (as my DD did) in their first 8 weeks of pregnancy. They had a 3-4 times higher amount of learning difficulties than standard pregnancies. I think there is still a lot we don't know about brain development in children.

In general, the last thing we ever wanted was a label for DGS. We were constantly being told he wasn't meeting normal expectations, not disruptive or angry, just unable to grasp what the others could. Y3 was dreadful, his teacher seemed to think she could bully him into learning at the same rate as the class and constantly telling us how much he was failing. Now however, he has his label, slow processing speed and problems with his short term memory. He has a supportive teacher this year, morning classes of literacy and numeracy of 4 children with one teacher, and he is starting to progress. He has learned more this term than all of last year and has stopped crying about going to school. He walks in with a smile now and that is all we ever wanted.

beginning to think this thread should be renamed Child's net or perhaps Egos net !! not coming across as good examples of caring intelligent individuals

Anya, please stop. I never said anything about your grandson. I never said children with disabilities were lazy or anything else, and you know it. At no time did I say ANYTHING about bad parenting.
You have insulted me without knowing me in a number of the posts and I haven't taken the bait. I am getting really tired of the snide remarks. You disagree with me, which is fine. You have done your best to twist what I said from the start, and that is fine too. Just stop, please. I asked for opinions and got them and am very interested in many things which have been said, but I think that is quite enough in the way of personal jibes.

Someone earlier in the thread asked if labelling was on the increase or if there is an increase in differently abled children. More children are appearing with difficulties due to both improved diagnosis and the survival of increasingly premature babies. I have no experience of teaching in schools but came across many infants of concern in pre-school years when I assessed them. My OH is clearly on the AS functioning well as an advanced programmer and mathematician. The rest of his family were horrified at my 'label' for him "as you have only known him 10 years" but on sitting down to draw a family genogram we immediately identified several others. Interestingly it has improved the relation ship my OH's siblings have with him. They are more patient and understanding now and go out of their way to support him in social situations. I feel he could have been helped more with an earlier 'label.'

One of them being the GS who is obviously 'lazy' and badly parented according to the OP.

And while I'd love to continue this ...? whatever?....I really must get the GSs sorted as they are here overnight. You carry on and I'll catch up with you about 10.30 pm.

Now you're repeating yourself! . and I don't think you know what the word means.

Let me help with that;
vehement or violent denunciation, censure, or reproach, railing accusation; vituperation, an insulting or abusive word or expression.

I don't think so!

I call it summarising your position so far. Nothing 'vehement or violent' no 'railing accusation; vituperation' or 'insulting or abusive word or expression'

And there was a question you have yet to answer.

Invective.......

What a load of bull. You dived in, split hairs, got yourself tied in knots with the semantics, have ignored those (other than myself) who tried to tell you how it was and insulted DD's HT.

Who are you to call someone you don't know 'unprofessional' .

We've all read enough of your posts to get your measure.

I sorry if you think I'm putting you down. I think this discussion is too important to be sullied by inaccuracy or invective.

And that misrepresentation does nothing to win an argument. It rather does a disservice to the cause they espouse.

Sounds like you have some kind of axe to grind Jayanna or you just like putting people down There is nothing to be ashamed about being told your teaching is 'outstanding'. It is hard though for those individuals who were judged to be 'inadequate'. But then we didn't need OFSTED to tell us that.

It did mean that some who should never have been teaching in the first place left the profession, but it also meant that others were offered support and a mentor to help and support them in their professional development.

I'm not a great fan of OFSTED having preferred the HMI system which often used local LEA staff who knew the schools.

Yes as you say they graded the teaching they observed. Where teaching was poor management were supposed to provide support leading to improvement. Your head teacher was unprofessional to say the least. But my point is that Anya can not say, as she did, that Ofsted rated her an outstanding teacher.

Not true, Jayanna. In the very early days, they gave Headteachers a list of the lessons they had observed with the grade awarded for the teaching of each lesson. No, they didn't say 'this is an outstanding teacher', but headteachers scrutinised the grades individual teachers were given.

I was a Head of Department when Ofsted first appeared on the scene. I had a member of department who was causing some concern for all sorts of reasons. I did my best to support this person, but it was hard work and taking up a lot of my time. I discussed the situation with the headteacher, who then told me the Ofsted grades and told me they'd get rid of the person. I was quite shocked that I'd been given the lesson grades and felt very uncomfortable about the methods which were used to remove the person from the school.

It was probably a positive move that this person left teaching, but I wasn't happy that confidentiality had been broken and I felt stuck in the middle. The Ofsted inspector had also wanted to discuss this teacher with me. In those days, a lot went on in meetings behind teachers' backs, which never appeared in the official written reports.

They graded the quality of teaching which they observed and it was indeed a horrendous and unfair judgement for the reasons I outlined above. It is true that management then msinterpreted this in some schools, but Ofsted never said this is an outstanding teacher, only that they had seen an example of outstanding teaching.
Teaching, after all, in recent years has encompassed much more than the delivery of lessons.

Those were the days when Ofsted would send a whole team for a week. Every teacher was observed for whole lessons - sometimes three or four times. At the end of the week, teachers were summonsed to a meeting with an inspector, who then gave out the lesson grades. These grades were given to headteachers, who were supposed to keep them confidential and weren't supposed to use them to target individual teachers, but they did. It was because individuals were often scapegoated for something which was a snapshot that unions fought for that aspect of Ofsted to be abolished. Of course, it was still possible to identify an individual teacher, if Ofsted highlighted a particular year group in primary or the only teacher of a specialist subject in secondary.

Indeed they did, daphnedill, and the grading was a horrendous experience for many teachers.