The Headmaster from Hell

Chocolatelovinggran

I'm intrigued, Cumbrianmale: what did the parents of this girl do following her expulsion? Did they laugh, too, or were sanctions imposed?

Hello, the parents were being divorced, but the father understandably was livid as it was the girl's GCE year. I think she ended up retaking her exams at a local college and I can't remember what happened to her afterwards.

I'm intrigued, Cumbrianmale: what did the parents of this girl do following her expulsion? Did they laugh, too, or were sanctions imposed?

Astitchintime

How is 'Saturday detention' a thing now?

I'm surprised the teachers unions haven't demanded double time for it. There used to be Saturday detentions at a local school until the seventies, but then the practice stopped( probably teachers wanting more money).
I used to always laugh when we were in detention, I got the school detention a couple of times, and we had to write essays about behaving in class and the importance of listening to teachers. We all knew they would go in the bin when we left the detention, so wrote any old rubbish down that had nothing to do with the subject, and it was never followed up.

A friend’s daughter was put in isolation last week and missed four lessons because her jumper was a crew neck not a vee neck. Surely contacting the adult in charge of buying the uniform would have been more appropriate. ( Not the school in the thread.)

How is 'Saturday detention' a thing now?

There are some pupils who, even if they come from settled and well off backgrounds, can still behave like utter monsters and delight in bullying other pupils and annoying teachers. A school in a well off area can have problems as much as in a poor area.
I can remember a family friend whose husband had his own business in Whitley Bay and the daughter attended a secondary school that was in a mostly middle class area. The school had issues with discipline, the country was just coming out of the punk era and there was quite a lot of bad behaviour, and the daughter and her friends decided one day to ambush the headmaster with eggs, yoghurt and milk. She was expelled and didn't give a damn eithe, as she thought it was a good laugh.

Cumbrianmale56

The thing is, you have a really rebellious and disruptive pupil and no matter how many times the school puts them in detention, that they probably never attend, or contacts their parents, who might not be bothered, the school eventually uses the ultimate sanction and expels them. This might make life easier for the teachers and other pupils, but the pupil is probably wandering around the streets looking for trouble or is drifting into drugs.
To me, the best thing to do with these pupils, is to put them into some kind of special needs unit where teachers are trained to deal with these sorts of pupils and hopefully sort them out. Locally, way back, there was an approved school for very badly behaved pupils that was like a psrt time boarding school where the pupils had to stay from Monday to Friday and the discipline, while not brutal, was strict. One friend I know who was sent there for hitting teachers and refusing to attend school did well there and ended up in a decent job in constuction with a BMW. Probably without this school which closed in the mid eighties, he would have been written off and ended up on the dole or in jail.

To me, the best thing to do with these pupils, is to put them into some kind of special needs unit where teachers are trained to deal with these sorts of pupils and hopefully sort them out.

Closed down in this area just a few years ago, Cumbrianmale. Three of my friends worked at the local one and years ago DH would take some of the school leavers from there on the YTS scheme, long abandoned.

Iam64

Some schools have greater discipline problems than others. It’s no surprise that the areas of high deprivation tend to have more disruptive children, more children with emotional and psychological problems than those in areas where parents are more likely to be in paid employment and to have been educated to A level or degree level.

I’ve never taught in primary nor high schools and I’ve had extensive contact with those schools. I was disgusted by your description of some schools as zoos David49. The children are not animals. The disruptive children almost all have either add/adhd/neurodiverse or/and from the kind of sad, difficult family backgrounds we can all describe.

We need to invest in our children. We need to invest in our teachers. We need to support parents who are struggling. Support services and CAMHs cut to the bone.

We also need to remember that inclusivity in schools, like care in the community, costs big money where we’ve simply had cost cutting

It's strange because Caldicot and surrounding villages in the catchment area are not an area of high deprivation. There may be troublemakers although more children than ever seem to have emotional and psychological problems and more and more families seem to be blended now.

Really. She fairs better in a more nurturing environment. Secondary schools are far too autocratic as it is. The one she’s at is the one people want their kids to go to, but by crikey it’s been a dreadful experience and I don’t want to wish her life away but we’ll both welcome the day she leaves. Secondary education really needs an overhaul.

The thing is, you have a really rebellious and disruptive pupil and no matter how many times the school puts them in detention, that they probably never attend, or contacts their parents, who might not be bothered, the school eventually uses the ultimate sanction and expels them. This might make life easier for the teachers and other pupils, but the pupil is probably wandering around the streets looking for trouble or is drifting into drugs.
To me, the best thing to do with these pupils, is to put them into some kind of special needs unit where teachers are trained to deal with these sorts of pupils and hopefully sort them out. Locally, way back, there was an approved school for very badly behaved pupils that was like a psrt time boarding school where the pupils had to stay from Monday to Friday and the discipline, while not brutal, was strict. One friend I know who was sent there for hitting teachers and refusing to attend school did well there and ended up in a decent job in constuction with a BMW. Probably without this school which closed in the mid eighties, he would have been written off and ended up on the dole or in jail.

Some schools have greater discipline problems than others. It’s no surprise that the areas of high deprivation tend to have more disruptive children, more children with emotional and psychological problems than those in areas where parents are more likely to be in paid employment and to have been educated to A level or degree level.

I’ve never taught in primary nor high schools and I’ve had extensive contact with those schools. I was disgusted by your description of some schools as zoos David49. The children are not animals. The disruptive children almost all have either add/adhd/neurodiverse or/and from the kind of sad, difficult family backgrounds we can all describe.

We need to invest in our children. We need to invest in our teachers. We need to support parents who are struggling. Support services and CAMHs cut to the bone.

We also need to remember that inclusivity in schools, like care in the community, costs big money where we’ve simply had cost cutting

Skydancer Reading back my comments about your GS, they come over as far more minty than I intended.

icanhandthemback makes the very good point that you can't really judge what is going to be useful until later life. I was made to learn lots of poetry by heart, which I hated at the time, but it means that I have a treasure trove of poems in my head that I have never forgotten because I was a child when I learnt them.*

I wish your GS all the best with his A'Level exams. It is good that he questions the status quo.

* Quite useful for quizzes and crosswords too.

This sounds like the problems were extreme at Caldicot School and something drastic needed to be done. However, this should be taken as an ideal blueprint for the future of Comprehensive education.

Plenty of schools up and down the country function pretty well without the need for strong-arm tactics. That is not to say that schools don't have problems with truancy, bullying, disruptive behaviour and disaffection with learning.

PaperMonster2

Could have sworn I commented on here - but I wouldn’t want my child anywhere near that Head.

Really?
Surely your child is not one that might need that kind of discipline?

A school where staff walked out in protest over pupil violence has been placed in the second highest level of monitoring by education watchdog Estyn. The inspectorate said Caldicot School is in need of "significant improvement".

The school is under-subscribed because parents would not send their children to that school because the pupils and teachers were frightened of the violent and abusive bullies.

Attendance is also below similar schools and needs addressing, the report, published on December 23 2024 after inspectors visited in October, adds. Inspectors said the newly-appointed acting headteacher has taken positive action, but more needs to be done.
The inspection report found moral among teachers and the behaviour of pupils has improved since Mr Ebenezer, who the document does not name, was appointed. It says that now: "Most pupils behave well and many engage purposefully in their learning."

But the report makes five recommendations for how the school must improve further. Inspectors will return to monitor progress in 12 months. "Pupils’ behaviour and attitudes to learning have improved considerably. In addition, there has been an increased focus on supporting staff well-being, resulting in better staff morale and teamwork," inspectors said

Could have sworn I commented on here - but I wouldn’t want my child anywhere near that Head.

“Do we really want this sort of draconian style of school management again?”

If you are entirely happy with the zoo that some schools have become it’s fine.

I felt like that at school, Skydancer but things I never thought I'd need have turned out to be incredibly useful. I don't think teenagers necessarily have the best view of what they will need as they don't have the whole picture at that age.
However, some subjects are wasted on the young and it might be better to have less academic lessons for those who can't cope with them whilst younger but who can access that education when they are older without having to pay through the nose. As a teacher, I had children coming into the classroom who had been completely turned off education by the time they were 8. I could predict who would find their later education a struggle. Our one size fits all approach doesn't suit quite a lot of the clientele so all children suffer from the disruption in the classroom.

M0nica

Precisely David what it did not do is stop anyone from misbehaving.

M0nica there's misbehaving which I'm sure most of us did and is part of teenage rebellion.

What goes on in some schools today is on an entirely different level.

At one time extremely disruptive pupils were removed from mainstream school and taught either in a Special Unit or a school for "maladjusted pupils", ie boys who had special behavioural and emotional needs, but that facility was closed a few years ago.

Skydancer

My teenage GS says a lot of lessons are a waste of time. He says he will never need to use a lot of what he has been taught especially in Maths. He thinks older children should be taught life skills such as managing money, cookery, natural history etc - things he will actually need to know in real life. He is currently taking A levels which he has chosen but even now he believes so much of it is irrelevant. I think this irrelevance is partly why pupils misbehave or play truant.

He might be surprised just how much he might use Maths in everyday life - if the internet goes down some young people would be lost without their phones to give ths answer to everything!

Indigo8

I once had to copy out a long poem in detention and I had to get all the line endings, verse endings and punctuation right. Great way to instil a love of poetry!

I am sure the teachers hated staying after school for detention as much as we did.

Do we really want this sort of draconian style of school management again?

I think the problems at this particular school were such thst draconian methods were the only way forward. Teachers frightened to teach because of threats of violence? How is any child supposed to learn in an atmosphere like that?
Parents frightened to send their children to that school?

Once calm has been achieved from chaos, perhaps discipline could be restored to a reasonable level.

*Indigo8•. Sorry I should have said “aspects of Maths”. It just seems to my GS as it seemed to me 60 years ago that so much of what is taught is only relevant to a few people. For example I spent years learning Chemistry and Physics and have never used any of it, nor remembered it. I agree that the school curriculum can’t be individually tailored but some of it is old hat and could be replaced with more modern topics.

Skydancer Please ask your GS, how do you tailor an entire school curriculum to suit one child who may or may not know what they want to do later in life? You have to offer a range of subjects to all so they can decide what is relevant to their future plans. Maths is relevant to quite a few careers, even nursing. In maths I learned how to calculate compound interest and how to deal with addition, subtraction, division and multiplication using pre-decimal coinage (much easier now that everything is base ten). Surely that could be described as money management.

Incidentally, two of my GSs go to different comps and they both have cookery lessons only it is called Food Technology for some reason.

I am very interested in natural history but I don't consider it an essential life skill.

I suspect caning works for some, not others. In the Isle of Man when they removed the birch from their punishments for petty crimes, the crime rate shot up. I don't think the actual punishment being meted out was necessarily the thing that stopped the persistent criminal, I suspect it prevented the criminality in the first place.

My teenage GS says a lot of lessons are a waste of time. He says he will never need to use a lot of what he has been taught especially in Maths. He thinks older children should be taught life skills such as managing money, cookery, natural history etc - things he will actually need to know in real life. He is currently taking A levels which he has chosen but even now he believes so much of it is irrelevant. I think this irrelevance is partly why pupils misbehave or play truant.

I once had to copy out a long poem in detention and I had to get all the line endings, verse endings and punctuation right. Great way to instil a love of poetry!

I am sure the teachers hated staying after school for detention as much as we did.

Do we really want this sort of draconian style of school management again?