Without a doubt, the situation in our schools has gotten really bad.
Teachers are leaving the profession en masse, as they battle impossible workloads, toxic work environments, a ‘broken’ Special Educational Needs System, and surges in pupil brutality.
Earlier this year, the Teachers’ Union estimated there were 30,000 violent incidents involving a student attacking a teacher with a weapon in a 12-month period.
Children as young as four have been discovered in possession of knives, while some schools have installed metal detectors, or ‘knife arches’, in a bid to curb attacks.
In the meantime, walkouts about subpar working conditions and low pay have occurred nationwide, and teachers have experienced intimidation from upper management.
The Daily Mail interviewed a teacher who described what a typical day at their secondary school actually entails to learn more about the ongoing difficulties that schools around the United Kingdom face.
That teacher said that as they walk through the school entrance, they think of the £200 in their bank account and their ever-increasing student debt, and they stop momentarily to remind themselves why they do this job.
‘Let’s hope I get out of here on time for once,’ they mutter under their breath as they prepare for another day of chaos.
The thing is, teaching is only half the job these days.
Most of a teacher’s time and energy is taken up by filling out perpetual admin, uploading notes of each second of the day onto digital logs, and endeavouring to impose draconian ‘classroom management techniques’ which create an emotionally-stunted, robot generation.
Children are now being groomed into county line gangs. Fights are breaking out at least once a week, and expelled pupils from other schools are preying near the grounds in COVID face masks, the new unofficial balaclava, and most days, schools are just about holding on.
‘And now to add to it.’ The teacher said, ‘We’ve caught pupils, some of whom were before the summer golden, top set students, carrying knives on them ‘for protection’.
‘They are stealing blades from home, hiding them in the bushes in nearby parks, and even using them to rob people at knifepoint.
‘As I walk into the staffroom, I can’t help but think, if we just focused on getting these troubled children engaged in their lessons and show them they can have a chance in life, they wouldn’t so easily end up in the wrong circles.
‘A lot of them come from broken families and impoverished communities with little to no way of guidance apart from school.’
There are altercations before class, even before the teacher gets to the playground – hearing fierce screams by the students’ entrances.
The teacher knows immediately it’s not the typical squealing from overexcited youngsters back from the weekend. A fight has broken out already.
A teenager that they know is in a gang is fighting with a pupil with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
Without pausing to think, because the teacher doesn’t have that indulgence, the teacher runs over to stop them.
There is no other way in this moment to de-escalate the situation other than to restrain the pupil, who is now aggressively fighting the boy with mild autism, who is also fighting back.
He has become increasingly violent and erratic, at which point the teacher has to take hold of him using force.
‘There have been so many instances like this that could get me fired, but there is no way I am going to stand back and let pupils launch themselves at each other.
‘And if that requires physically restraining them and risking my job, then so be it.
‘The boy who is in a gang is a bright kid, full of potential. I know from the classes I’ve taught him, but he was recruited by a county lines gang just months ago. We carry out after-school patrols every evening to stop the grooming, but there’s only so much we can do, and some, unfortunately, do fall through the cracks.
‘The same gang that recruited him staged a robbery, or so we understand, so they could then tell him he owed them money. To make up for it, he has to steal phones and move drugs for them.
‘They always target the vulnerable kids.
‘Anyway, now he’s been humiliated by the pupil in front of the school, we know it won’t be let go so easily. He and his gang will be waiting for him on the way home, which will add to our after-school patrol job.
‘Students are shouted at to disperse to their next lessons as the fight has now been stopped, and the kids are taken indoors.
‘Of course, the problem is, while the fight may have ended, everything now goes up on TikTok straight away.
‘One pupil, usually one of the quiet and ‘well-behaved’ ones, will have filmed it and it will probably go viral by lunch.
‘In fact, faceless TikTok accounts, mainly started up by the shy girls in the school, were caught last year posting content on who they would like to see fight next and who they want to see beaten up – and boys being boys, they go ahead and set up these fights to impress the girls.
‘They even uploaded vile and abusive posts about teachers in the assumption we wouldn’t be able to track them down.
‘But after looking at comments by hundreds of pupils, we were able to narrow it down to the kids who were taught by all the mentioned teachers. All we had to do was tell each of them we knew who it was, and the truth started spilling.
‘We were shocked to find one of the girls running the pages would never be caught misbehaving in school and had a golden record of zero detentions.
‘Anyway, now we’re in lessons, there are a few hours of peace.
‘I love watching even the pupils we know are in gangs turn into nerdy kids when they become engaged in their lessons.
‘Some teachers seem to think it’s all about rigidly sticking to the guides provided to us from the powers that be, but I want my students to care about their work, to relate it to their lives, the society they live in.
‘And it means they actually do their work. I have students who are scoring top grades in my class coming to me in tears because they’ve been sent to detention for not sitting or nodding the right way.
‘Now it gets to lunch, we have to make sure all the year groups are kept apart in the playground.
‘But it is also the time to call up the parents of the pupils who were involved in the fight.
‘The boy who is affiliated with the gang should have been permanently expelled months ago, but endless red tape means that there are two categories of children who are virtually impossible to expel: pupils with SEND, and pupils who are classed as vulnerable and involved with social services.
‘If we expel him, there is the risk he will be completely taken in by the gang.
‘The boy with SEND is not without fault either, but again, the system makes it extremely difficult to discipline him.
‘It is like these kids are void of responsibility, exactly the opposite of what we want to teach them.
‘There has been an explosion in kids with SEND since I first began teaching. A SEND overdose.
‘When I entered the profession about 15 years ago, there were about 15 teaching assistants (TAs) in the school I was teaching in, and hardly any pupils with special needs.
‘But over the last decade, and even more so after COVID, the number of kids with SEND has shot up exponentially.
‘Now, parents deliberately look to get their kids a SEND diagnosis, what we call an EHCP (Education Health and Care Plan), so that they are hard to expel.
‘Yet there are only half a dozen TAs, the least I have ever seen, and the strain is unbearable.
‘I think to myself as I make that call to the boys’ parents, ‘our state schools are being killed off.
‘To no surprise, the gang-affiliated boy’s parents were reluctant to acknowledge any fault on their son’s behalf, preferring instead to blame other children entirely for his ‘reaction’. Any conversation about taking responsibility for his behaviour fell on deaf ears.
‘This is nothing new. We are constantly battling parents who have even tried to sue us for discrimination for trying to discipline their kids.
‘Now that’s my lunch wasted, I’d better hurry up and get to the canteen to pick up whatever remains.
This is the state of our schools, even in the canteen – portion sizes have more than halved from when this teacher was at school, which he confesses was numerous years ago.
The teacher said that as they edge their way toward the end of the day, their hardest, and arguably most important job begins.
‘We call it chicken shop duty. But really, it’s manning all areas where kids congregate after school.
‘A few of us put on high-vis vests every evening and go to the chicken shops, the parks, the bus stops.
‘It has now become one of the most important things we can do. It is when the gangs recruit the kids, and it is when troublesome students who have been expelled from other schools turn up.
‘In the olden days, kids would turn up in uniform from other schools and fight. Inter-school fights. They were a big thing, horrible, violent.
‘That has gone now, but it has been replaced with permanently excluded kids from other schools turning up in tracksuits and face masks.
‘COVID face masks are being used by them as unofficial balaclavas to hide their identity.
‘And they come to these spots where students gather and try to influence them.
‘We try to move them on, but the problem with moving them on is that they often carry blades on them.
‘These are kids in county lines, these are kids in pupil referral units, essentially they are kids who are not in school.
‘And that can quickly become dangerous.’
What we need is to bring back rigid discipline in all schools, and our government needs to support teachers. This is all down to no punishment and ‘woke’ foolery.
It’s about time parents put down their phones and parented their children, and our government need to bring back the cane, it worked well when I was at school.
Some youngsters need a slap sometimes. My mother only had to give me ‘the look’ and I would shake because I knew that if I didn’t reel my neck in, I knew what was next.
This is what you get when you treat small children like little adults and set no boundaries.
Policing is non-existent, particularly when it comes to gangs of yobs on the street. Our police are more interested in arresting those who say what they believe in. It’s not the Metropolitan Police, it’s the metropolitan police of woke.
I went to school back in the 1970s. Back then, the odd fight would break out, but both parties were normally hauled into the head’s office, and we were severely dealt with, normally with the cane. Then the parents were notified, and when you got home, they would dole out their own punishment.
The issue is that children have been given far too many rights, and then we have the lazy parenting, and it’s been going on for decades, and what do we have now? Feral children, and what’s more, they know their rights. If you touch me, I’ll call social services or the police, so now, not only are parents lazy, they are scared of the repercussions.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 