I agree wholeheartedly with Giok's comments (12.07 PM yesterday) about schooling and discipline.

I have spent the past 6 months working as a supply (temporary) teacher in a junior school on such an estate, and it has been an extremely stressful and heartbreaking experience. It is one of the reasons I haven't been visting/posting here as much: I have simply been too exhausted.

In this school (and I have no doubt there are many others like it), the home lives of a large number of the children are unbelievably heartbreaking: ever-changing "fathers", parents who are alcoholics and/or on drugs, parents who don't have enough food in the house, so the children arrive at school starving hungry, parents who are in and out of prison or are violent and abusive, parents who are barely older than being children themselves.

The school had been on "special measures", meaning that it had been threatened with closure because of its poor performance, but had since been inspected and allowed to stay open. It is a very stressful environment with, needless to say, a quick turn-over of staff. This, of course, compounds the problem because, for a lot of the children, school is their only chance of finding any kind of routine and stability in their lives.

What saddened me greatly was the poor quality of teaching these children were being given. Their deputy headteacher had moved to another post, and I was brought in for 3 days a week (to replace his 5 days). His Year 4 class was being taught together with the Year 3 class, by the existing Year 3 teacher, plus a couple of classroom assistants. As the supply teacher, I had to follow the "plans" (such as they were) that the Year 3 teacher gave me. I never knew until I got in each day whether I would be with Year 3 or Year 4, and the "plans" were told to me on the spot, at the start of each morning or afternoon. This teacher was living not just day to day, but hour by hour, deciding things off the top of her head and just thinking of things to get through the day. The numeracy "plan" generally consisted of my being told to "get them to choose 4 digits at random, then another 4 digits and add them together". Most of the time they were given colouring-in to do, in some kind or other. For history, they cut out pictures from a worksheet, coloured them in, and stuck them in so-called "Humanities Folders." The educational content of these children's school days was minimal, I would say.

What saddened me most of all was the attitude towards discipline. The school was following the advice of a Behaviour Team who had come into the school. The greatest punishment possible was for a child to be moved temporarily to another classroom. I was pulled up by the headteacher for reprimanding children for saying unkind things to each other, and for raising my voice to insist on silence when explaining things to them. "We have other ways of dealing with behaviour here", she said.

When I told her I thought that without reprimand for unkindness etc. they would not get on well in the world and teachers owed it to them to show a different way of behaving, her reply was: "They will get on very well in their world." That attitude on the part of a headteacher responsible for these children saddened me greatly - but it says it all. No wonder these problems are persisting and growing in society.

- jeanie