I’ve been reading an excellent blog by David Didau (@LearningSpy) called Bottom Sets and the Scourge of Low Level Disruption (http://bit.ly/2giXEut).
I’m not going to analyse or repeat David’s work here – please just read it. I know you will, for which person, working in a school, is not interested in problem behaviour? When I read it myself, I felt it was the story of my life – or at least a part of it.
I say that because during the worst time of teaching career – perhaps of my whole life if I’m honest – low-level disruption played continuously in the background like that ominous and insolent theme that Ennio Morricone wrote for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.
I had the lot, lesson after lesson – forced laughter, turning round to talk, falling off chairs, arriving late, losing stuff, failing, tragically, to learn – but you surely know, and if you don’t, then God bless you.
My problem was with a third year (year 9 in today’s system) class which was in the bottom stream of seven. We’re not talking about sets, you understand, but fixed streams. This was the early 1970s when children in secondary schools of all kinds – comprehensive, grammar, sec mod – were often allocated to one of multiple streams. Once there, a child would usually stick.
“Promotions” were rare, partly because good-hearted staff were deeply reluctant to push any child down to make room and also because the curriculum was not common across the school. A bottom class might miss out on a foreign language, for example.
Unsurprisingly, my bottom stream children knew their worth, which was minimal; they were not expected to learn very much and, boy, did they know it.
I was new to the school, but because I had previously worked in a well-run “remedial” department (that was the term then), I was the obvious choice to teach them just about everything. I had them for English, history and maths, 20 periods a week, including one day (Monday of course) when I had them for three doubles – one before break, one after and another for nearly the whole afternoon.
Have you ever experienced the Sunday evening blues? I had them in spades. In fact nearly 40 years later I still get a frisson when Songs of Praise comes on.
So I struggled, leaving the details to your imagination. But none of that would happen today would it? Of course it would, and it does. Low-level disruption is still a live issue, well-recognised by Ofsted, as well as by many battling teachers. So can I draw some lessons from that distant time, vivid as it still is in my memory, always ready to jump up and make me blink?
First, what were my own mistakes? The most basic one was to assume that what worked for me in my previous school, where I taught alongside a superb department head, would work in this new setting. Accordingly, I tried to be affable, smiling, everybody’s pal. This school, though, was run by men and women of steely demeanour, whose glance could freeze. So I never took off, and ended up always about to crash and burn.
Then, I should have firmly questioned my timetable at the outset, for I realised too late that I had been dumped on. The phrase, “they saw me coming”, describes the position exactly.
Perhaps most importantly of all, I should have asked for help. I seemed to be well liked in the staffroom, and everyone surely knew the trouble I was in. But in those days, you just got on with it as best you could.
But what about the school? What was wrong there, and what are the lessons for today’s teachers and leaders? First, discipline needs to be a whole-school issue, governed by an agreed and enforced policy. Nobody, no matter how experienced, should be afraid to ask for help or to offer it.
Then, it has to be recognised that a class labelled “difficult” is actually made up of individuals, each with his or her own needs. One of the boys in “my” class clearly had a mental health problem. A group of other boys dominated everyone. Some children sat silently, hoping to avoid trouble. And yet this class was treated as a homogeneous bottom stream group.
The most obvious lesson, though, is that streaming was always counter-productive, and for years has been replaced by “setting”. But much of the argument against streaming applies also to setting.
As David Didau argues, from evidence, it’s all about expectations, which are there, whether recognised or not. My horror class was expected to misbehave, and were not expected to succeed at any aspect of their work. A low set in a 21st century school is rarely treated so dismissively; schools proudly claim to have high expectations for all – and yet, scratch the surface, and maybe there’s still a hint of what I experienced decades ago.
I was lucky. I left that school after a year and a half, taking the lessons into a new phase of my career. But the scars are still there, and just writing this is a kind of catharsis.
- Gerald Haigh was a teacher in primary, secondary and special schools for 30 years, 11 of them in headship. You can find him on Twitter @geraldhaigh1. His previous blogs and articles for SecEd can be found via http://bit.ly/1UojJ5B