Small grandchildren doing a lot of high pitched sqeauling.

LewlewI always thought that the fist rule of "how to physically handle difficult children" was "don't". Any child who assaults a teacher (particularly a year 6 child) should be immediately suspended and possibly permanently excluded.If the school is not doing this it is putting its staff at risk. Your niece should contact her union rep and discuss what happened.
Difficult children can be handled but it requires a whole school approach and a dedicated staff, working together.
Ways of managing behaviour can be learned and any good teacher picks up ideas and tactics throughout her career from watching people who are good at this. Your niece doesn't need to accept the children sent to her she should tell everyone she is not prepared to carry on doing this.

I definitely think it's a girl thing I have children either side of me a girl one side and two boys on the other side the girl is frequently heard and her friends high pitched squealing yet the boys who play out more are rarely heard as children we were told to keep the noise down by parents and occasionally neighbours however I dread to think what the reaction would be now

Sound like school leaders are not fully in charge! No teacher should ever be assaulted by pupils but it happens! My DH still has the scar on his hand where he was bitten by a teenaged boy. DH was splitting up a fight! I have also been at the wrong side of pupils' anger/hurt on several occasions. However there do need to be non negotiable expectations of behaviour and clear consequences fairly and consistently carried out. This must be reinforced by senior staff! Good luck to your niece ..she sound like she is made of tough stuff!

Penstemmon Thanks for your insight. We are at a school that has become an academy. They actually were doing better when they were not according to the head and other veteran teachers. Resources are very thinly spread... the sponsoring body is not doing a very good job it seems.

My niece has had to take in-service training and courses on how to physically handle difficult children! A Year 6 boy put her in a head-lock and she said she had to really reign in her emotions not to knee him in the goolies. If they can train people to physicially handle difficult kids, surely they can teach techniques for creating a good classroom environment. Everything my niece does is what her mum did in her day and it works. The other teachers just ignore the noise, or one goes in a storeroom and cries. In the end, they just send the difficult ones to my niece. This cannot be the way an NQT year is supposed to go. She has to share a classroom assistant.

She herself was a CA whilst doing her teacher training course part time at this same school. It's why they were so keen to have her for her NQT. She was looking after classrooms by herself as well as a CA which was supposedly not permitted.

Oh well... soon over!

I have spent a lifetime teaching in inner city schools as did DH. It was tough but the expectations were there that children were in school to learn. My current experience, going into schools, is that most schools have created an atmosphere for good learning behaviour and it is the minority where things are awry.

It is difficult to be 'taught' how to manage behaviour! You can be told strategies but 2 different people using the same strategy can get very different responses! If yous niece has a good personality, likes the children and enjoys her work she will get there! If this is her first year of teaching it is still considered part of her training.

is she in London or another city?

Penstemmon my niece is a good disciplinarian, learnt from her mum who was a special needs teacher of the 'old school' and knew how to be firm but rewarding over bad and good behaviour.

Teachers at inner city schools try to be 'inventive' and use whistles, tambourines, clappers, etc. but the novelty wears off and the volume rises back to screech level. She does not use props... but keeps order with 'force of personality'.

This is a major thing my niece moaned about all during her teacher training was that they are not taught how to control or maintain discipline and attention in a class. She was older than the average teacher training age and was really taken aback by this as was her mum. Her tutors said she would get this kind of training where she gets her NQT.

Nope... didn't happen. The veteran teachers at this inner city school cannot even control the children, so no one is helping anyone learn control.
These same teachers send troublesome kids from their upper years to HER Yr 1 room when they get out of hand. They should be going to the head's office, but the head doesn't want them!

This is absolutely true and my niece does not want to stay after her NQT is signed off, even though she actually likes her pupils. But she is STUCK there till December because you cannot give late notice at end of July (when she'd be signed off NQT) as she does not want to risk a poor NQT assessment by giving notice now which is what is normally required. I think she is considering going anyways and turning to supply teaching. Less aggro.

They are not little for long so enjoy the squeeling while it lasts.

Lewlew why does your niece not get the children to be quieter? I still go into several primary schools and it is rare to hear disruptive noise in classrooms..often a busy hum but nothing untoward!

It is not a new thing - fifty years ago children playing in a narrow strip of scrub left behind between our estate and the next one used to shriek and squeal and I hated it. Weekend evenings were even worse when the teenagers were racketing about there.

We learnt to ignore it - but one day a friend's son (about 10) was set upon by a group of older lads and was really screaming but no-one came to his aid. Since then I have tried to ask screamers what is wrong, and when they say "Nothing" I then ask how I will know when they are in genuine distress if they scream for fun as though from terror. They look uncomprehending, but perhaps it gets through to them just WHY adults don't like it.

I have lived near the school for 40 years the whole estate and school was built then. I was at work all day so did not notice it. We had children playing outside but not this screaming which seems to be the norm these days.

I have a dog and he reacts to the screaming. If my dog barked continuously these same people would not be happy. Perhaps I should let him out to bark at them. Parents smile benignly and never ask them to "keep it down".

Some of the neighbours are elderly, like me, but all wear hearing aids, they can switch them off.

I don't think it's a bad thing to discuss at all... kids are permitted to be very loud at my niece's school where she teaches. The noise is deafening she says and hard for them to learn.

Screaming/high-pitch squealing, whatever, has its place.

I am remembering this kind of image from my teen years!

Screaming Beatles Fans

My GCs do seem t have short periods where they run around making screeching noises. It doesn't last long and they are swiftly told to 'shush'. However the loudest, longest and screecheist noises I have heard were from next door neighbour's teenage daughter and her friends greeting each other at her birthday party.

I think my ears are tired, at 72 the screaming just rattles me.

Both our present and previous houses have been opposite primary schools. With 35 years experience of listening to children playing in their school playground I can say that throughout that time children's voices when they are excited and shouting are high-pitched and that when they are playing and running around they are excited and shouty.

DH has commented on it a lot recently. I think that possibly, as we get older and our hearing gets variable, for some reason we find these high pitched voices more difficult to cope with.

My OP seems to have gone off target.
I am not being a grumpy old granny. I can fully understand that small children playing make a lot of noise, that is children for you and it does not worry me too much.

It was very specifically the very high pitched "train whistle" noise that Deedaa described that I was thinking of.
All I was trying to do in this thread was to find out how many other grans had heard this particular "whistle "?squeal" noise.
I had never heard that particular sound from my noisy children who were born in the late 1970s.
I will go away and bury my head in the sand.

A lot of children do squeal - nothing new there, but I think it is possible to gently discourage them. These days they hear so many adults whooping and shrieking,and you can't blame the tinies for copying them. It's endemic on the streets and especially on TV.
Why do adults carry on like this? You would think that squealing and shrieking would be a bit infra dig for anyone over fourteen!

People who live near schools really cannot complain about the noise of 100+ children playing!
What a lot of grumpy grans ! I agree that whinging is not appropriate behaviour but shouting, yelling and making squeaky noises/ airplane noise/ nee-naw sounds etc etc as they play is all part of being a child.

Continuous crying is another matter and may mean help is needed.

Children are allowed to run wild nowadays. Never told to keep the noise down. Sick of the don't mither me attitude of parents, just do as you please.

Well, it is 5 pm and I have two squealing girls 8 and 10 outside my house, one lives next door. I have asked them not to scream. Usually I am trying to watch Pointless. It has no affect. The school is at the back of me, in term time, I can hear the screams from there. I do not recall us screaming we may have shouted but it is not the same as constant screaming at high pitch. One of the children lives further up the road but they pick to play outside my gate. I do have double glazing but perhaps I need triple. I am lucky it is this late in the day. Last week they were out at 8 am. I believe the Mother has a new full time job. She used to be a dinner lady, school hours. The older sister 16 is looking after the screamer and obviously happy to let her out.

My sister and I were not allowed to squeal , scream when we were young and would be in trouble if we did . Its up to parents to put a stop to it as soon as it happens . Screaming should be reserved for emergency situations only !

Our next door neighbour, ( in France), has a gite with a swimming pool and, over the years , the happy/ shouty giggly noises of visiting children have become high decibel screaming, screeching and squealing .
As this goes on for hours unchecked by parents it does appear that for many children this is the norm.
My husband has been known to mutter and rant and then, if the noise is too disturbing, he opens his studio door which is adjacent to their pool and lets rip with his electric guitar - I retire to the other end of the garden where the music is of a reasonable level! Seems to do the trick!

Its the parents who are fault. I was sitting in a restaurant yesterday having what I thought was a quiet sunday lunch, then the running and the screeching from children started from 2 families at 2 different tables. We were in the middle of it. Nobody batted an eyelid. I was really very unhappy about it and when the waitress asked the usual "is everything alright" referring to the meal, i quickly retorted that the food was fine, but the environment was not good. She was most unsympathetic. When I finished my meal, we paid and made it clear we wouldn't be back if they could not provide a peaceful atmosphere. We didn't leave a tip.

It's not new but been building up over the years. When mine were little, I would bring them indoors if they screamed. They soon learned not to. It's unnecessary and annoying to others. Nobody minds the normal sounds of children enjoying themselves but they need to learn to consider others. Many parents ignore it but to ignore is to condone. How will they know it's not socially acceptable to screech and squeal when playing if adults don't guide them?
My grandchildren don't do it (much) but can be influenced at times by others that do. We owe it to children to teach them to consider others.

It isn't anything new. When DD was small, she had a friend who was a screamer. We had three big dogs, very gentle but also very loyal. I shut them away when the friend came to play because I was concerned that the dogs would run in to sort out what they perceived as a problem, someone being attacked that they needed to protect. The Friend asked where the dogs were and I explained where they were and why. She never screamed again at our house because she enjoyed the dogs being allowed out to play. The children can stop doing it, as other posters have said.

I don't think it's new, I think we learnt to block it out when we were younger, but now when out hearing is altering (getting worse) it just seems to hit a pitch that is right up there on the annoyance scale. As my mother got deafer she used to react more to the squealing too.