Pressure and Professionalism

The NUT have put a report they’ve commissioned on the the impact of recent and present government policies on the working lives of teachers on the web.

I’ve not had a chance to read it all but here are a few things I took from it:

School leaders described themselves as caught in a cross fire of prescriptive national policies on the one hand and local expectations and demands on the other. While attempting to be circumspect in reference to children and families and careful to avoid blaming the parents, school staff were clearly struggling with a new order of social and peer group challenges. Reasonable behaviour in school and parental support out of school could not be assumed and the response to punishment and exclusion often resulted in confrontation and, on occasion, both verbal and physical assault. In an attempt not to lay blame at parents’ door the discourse was framed in terms of the mediating influence of newspapers, television, the internet, the drug, alcohol and permissive culture in which many parents have simply lost control of children as they entered the turbulent adolescent years.

And:

Current initiatives such as Assessment for Learning (Black et al. 2003) and Learning to Learn (James et al. 2006) all share the same perspective that in order for pupils to become autonomous learners they must continually question the strategies that they use and the decisions they make in attempting to solve intellectual problems. While extreme misbehaviour in the classroom obviously demands a swift, uncompromising response, so that classroom rules are unequivocal, pupils are not often expected to apply the same metacognitive skills that they use for academic problem solving to issues of personal relationships except in PSHE and citizenship sessions.

Filed under: education, NUT, Pressure and Professionalism

Steroids

A piece in the The Education Guardian reports on a speech by Steve Sinnot, General Secretary of the NUT, which raises concerns about the abuse of steroids:

Mr Sinnott also warned that “size zero” models on television were leading some young girls to aspire to an impossible body image.

“In order to conform to what is perceived as the norm or that which is beautiful, young people can resort to some terrifying measures,” he said.

“In my home area of Merseyside some young boys are turning to the use of anabolic steroids – a drug previously to be found only among body builders – as an instant fix for a designer body.

“The NHS on Merseyside has said that boys as young as 14 are using steroids to grow faster and bigger.”

The same story – word for word – in The Metro.

Further reading:

• When bigger isn’t better
• Boys of 12 are abusing steroids
• Why steroids are the new teen drug

Filed under: Drug Education Forum Members, Steroids, NUT

Teachers ‘find drugs and weapons’

The BBC on research carried out for the NUT:

Overall, the share of teachers who had never found drugs or weapons on pupils has grown.But one in four said they had found an offensive weapon and one in five said they had found pupils possessing drugs.

A staggering one in 10 teachers had discovered children dealing in drugs.

Others also cover the story: Channel 4 News, The Telegraph, and The Metro.

As you would expect you can download the full report from the NUT’s website.  It says:

• Compared to 2001, teachers reported significantly more possession of drugs by pupils.  Teachers had experienced an increase in the traffic of drugs on a monthly and weekly basis, but the overall number of reports was smaller than for possession.  (Reports of possession were up from 1 per cent of teachers in 2001 to 2.2 per cent in 2008 on a weekly basis and up from 2 per cent of teachers in 2001 to 2.7 per cent in 2008 on a monthly basis).

Later on they give more detail saying:

2 per cent of all teachers (including teachers of young children and/or in rural areas) encounter possession of drugs on a daily or weekly basis, but in schools where drugs do occur, such as urban secondary schools, 11 per cent of teachers encounter them daily or weekly.

The government’s guidance for schools on drugs issues says:

It is vital that schools send a clear message to the whole school community that the possession, use or supply of illegal and other unauthorised drugs (as designated by the headteacher) within school boundaries is unacceptable. [page 51]

Supplying an illegal drug is a serious breach of school rules and it may be one of the exceptional circumstances where the headteacher judges that it is appropriate to permanently exclude a pupil, even for a one-off or first-time offence. In making this judgement the headteacher should have regard to the school’s policy on drugs and consider the precise circumstances of each case, including the nature of the incident and the evidence available. This may also include the precise nature of the supply (see section 5.1).

Where pupils are permanently excluded for supplying an illegal drug, repeated possession and/or use of an illegal drug on school premises, the Secretary of State would not normally expect the governing body or an independent appeal panel to reinstate the pupil. [page 73]

Filed under: drug dealing, school drug policy, NUT