Educating Yorkshire

[Stouffer]

I couldn't be a teacher, my fuse is far too short.

[Champ]

Just watched the second episode on 4OD. As with the first episode I thought the result of the main issue was totally wrong. Felt sorry for that kid Jac. From what little footage we seen of him, it seemed all he wanted to do was go to school, keep his head down and be educated. He's stood up for himself and has been punished for it. How the fuck did that Georgia walked away from it unpunished ? It was obvious even the year head had issues with him being excluded.

 

Is the mantra to just keep unruly kids off the streets and in school at all costs regardless of the effects it has on other kids.

 

It was satisfying to see the reality hit Georgia that she'd just wasted the last five years of her life. Well as long as there's a ready supply of Guinness her kids will be fine.

As I mentioned in a previous post, its more than a mantra, in Scotland, at least, Mick, with schools being rated according to the number of exclusions.

 

Much to Mr Champ's disgust I thought that inside Georgia was a nice kid who, in different circumstances, ie with different direction from her mother, could have really achieved 

[Rico1304]

The Head is interviewed in today's Telegraph.

[Champ]

The Head is interviewed in today's Telegraph.

Uhuh?

[Phoenix]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10309212/Tough-love-for-school-troublemakers.html

 

 

By Julia Llewellyn Smith

7:11PM BST 14 Sep 201

 

It’s a week since the first episode of Educating Yorkshire, Channel 4’s riveting fly-on-the-wall documentary about life in a Dewsbury comprehensive, was aired. In that period, headmaster Jonny Mitchell’s life, not to mention the lives of his staff and pupils, has been transformed.

“The reaction to the programme’s been overwhelmingly positive – 98 per cent of the emails have been gushing with praise, with the two per cent negative, complaining I’m not clean-shaven enough,” he enthuses, sitting in his stark office at Thornhill Community Academy, where viewers have seen him berate his sometimes feckless, and frequently foul-mouthed, pupils.

“The kids are absolutely buzzing. Before they might have been like this…” Mitchell lopes across his office, shoulders slumped, then suddenly straightens up. “Now they’re a foot taller, chests puffed out.

“As for me, I’m suddenly on the sofa with Ryan [the latte-drinking 12-year-old pupil who was the star of the first episode], appearing on The Alan Titchmarsh Show, sitting next to Russell Grant and the barmaid from Coronation Street. It’s just surreal. It’s not what we signed up for. We did it to show that Dewsbury’s not all crap, that it’s not just all poor, rough, Shannon Matthews and race riots and the EDL.”

In that aim, he has – partly – succeeded. What he has also done, inadvertently, is turn himself into a heart-throb. “Mr Mitchell, will you marry me?” is a typical comment on the show’s Facebook page.

 

“No, you can’t go there!” exclaims Mitchell, who’s married to a fellow teacher, and has three daughters, aged 13, eight and six. But his broad grin suggests that he’s not totally averse to this attention.

“There’ve only been a few thousand comments,” he demurs. “I’ve been called a TILF [meaning “Teacher I’d like to ----”], though I’m sure the people saying it are all 55 and greying and haven’t got their own teeth. Heat magazine emailed asking if I’d be its pin-up. And there’s been quite a lot of interest from the male species. It’s very, very uncomfortable,” he says, looking distinctly relaxed. “I’m a portly, almost middle-aged, balding geek. It’s got to have something to do with my authority.”

On that, Mitchell’s completely right. Aged 41, tall and – apart from the stubble – hair-free, he looks like a bouncer yet radiates matinee-idol charisma. On the first day of term, the cameras caught him shimmying across his office to Let’s Face the Music and Dance. His firm but affectionate interactions with his pupils have made the programme a huge hit, attracting more than three million viewers.

But while no one could fail to be impressed by Mitchell’s and his staff’s dedication and patience, what is unsettling is how – at least so far in the series – they pay far more attention to troublemakers than to diligent pupils.

In the second episode, shown last week, Jac, a motivated, serious child, was sent to “isolation” (working in a unit alone) after losing his temper. But, to the outrage of social-media commentators, Georgia, the “cool” girl who’d provoked him, went mostly unpunished.

“That showed us making a human error,” Mitchell shrugs. “That’s what life is like. We’re not these arbiters who get things right all the time. What it does show is how staff bend over backwards to try and make the lot of the kids as good as possible.”

But perhaps they bend over too much. When asked if she feared the head, Georgia smirked: “It’s not like he can smack me and send me to bed, is it?” And in episode one,

14-year-old Kamrrem was sent to Mitchell’s office for misbehaviour for the 73rd time – a somewhat extreme example of a second chance.

“We keep giving [disruptive children] more chances because if we exclude them, someone else is going to have to educate them and deal with them,” explains Mitchell, who has been running the school for two years, his first job as a head. “Kamy is a really good kid who just gets it wrong sometimes. If he makes the mistakes he makes outside school when he’s 16, his life is ruined. He needs to make mistakes in a controlled environment where we can support him.”

Great for Kamrrem – but how will the parents who had complained about him feel? Mitchell explains that Kamrrem and his ilk might not be kicked out, but they might not return to the classroom, either, instead being sent – under the school’s supervision – on vocational courses.

“These kids are not college fodder – they’re the kind of people who, maybe 10 years ago, would have gone straight onto the dole and got a council house, tried to get a baby as soon as possible. Being sat in a classroom five days a week will make them kick off because they can’t cope with the cooped-up atmosphere and the standards, so we try to find the education more akin to the kind of work they’ll end up doing.”

As for the well-behaved pupils: “We send postcards home praising them, we invite parents in and congratulate them on their child’s behaviour.” On the day I visit the school, children with good behavioural and attendance records (83 per cent of them) are on a reward trip to Alton Towers, while the troublemakers, already familiar from the television, skulk the corridors, rolling their eyes at staff who order them to turn down their sleeves.

Allowing cameras from the team that had made the hugely popular Educating Essex into his school was a gamble for Mitchell. Thornhill sits on a windswept estate outside Dewsbury, one of the most deprived towns in Britain.

At Thornhill, an unlovely collection of prefabs, around 30 per cent of the pupils come from single-parent homes, and 42 per cent have been on free school meals in the past six years, compared with a national average of 16 per cent. At one point, the school was almost closed, after being rated one of the worst in the country.

But in the past five years, exam results have improved. The school is now rated “good” by Ofsted, and is in the top 6 per cent nationally for progress made by pupils. But it still only has around 774 pupils, when it was built to house 900, meaning a loss of potential funding. “I did the programme to improve numbers, and it’s working. In the past week alone, some kids have already transferred from other schools.”

Mitchell is the Dewsbury-born son of an ambulance worker and a midwife, though now he lives 20 miles away in Pontefract: “It makes me feel a traitor – like Sean Connery.” At his comprehensive nearby, he was “a very happy geek”.

“I was unctuous, used to get in early to make a cup of coffee for my teacher,” he recalls. “I wasn’t popular. Most of the kids thought I was a greasy swot.” He found his feet socially at sixth form college and even more so at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where he studied interpreting and translating.

His original ambition was to teach, but he was warned off by teachers at his school who told him he was “too clever”. He became an accountant but was quickly “bored stiff”. Mitchell retrained and, from the moment he began his first placement in Leeds, teaching French, knew this was his vocation.

“After seeing the programme, so many people have told me 'I could never do your job’ – but teachers do it because they love it,” he says. “You can’t learn to teach, you’ve got to have something in you, a bit of buzz.”

But Educating Yorkshire gives the strong impression that teaching, at least at Thornhill, isn’t so much about imparting knowledge as policing. Mitchell says that about 65 per cent of his time spent with pupils is for “negative reasons”. But should teachers really be spending so much time on discipline? Isn’t that the parents’ job?

“We have a lot of big families round here, it is tough. The parents are pulled every which way. You could make your own comments about that kind of social environment, but I will not, it wouldn’t be appropriate. Sometimes when you’re looking in the parents’ eyes, you see the message 'Help me be better’, and this is what we try and do.”

The school’s ultimate sanction (eventually meted out – hooray! – to Georgia) is exclusion from the end-of-year “prom”, an American concept that makes Mitchell wince. “We’d prefer to call it the end-of-year disco, but there you have it. It’s obscene, but the kids love it. I had to tell Kamy’s mother that her older son wasn’t going because he’d verbally abused a police officer. She was practically begging me to change my mind, because she’d spent thousands on hiring a Ferrari to take him there. And they’re on free school meals!”

Despite his star being in the ascendant, Mitchell has no plans to leave Thornhill. But after all his graft, how does he feel watching the scene in the first programme where 15-year-old Kayleigh refused to accept her punishment for smoking, with the complaint: “I’m not having [Mitchell] thinking he can do what he ------- wants”?

“Kayleigh’s apologised to me for that. I said there’s no need, you said it to one of your best friends, not me. She’s a lovely kid and she’d had a bad day.” Mitchell chuckles. “Though, I admit, for about 15 seconds I did think: 'You cheeky little ----bag, I’ll get you!’.”

 

What Paul says seems to be right with the results and league tables etc

[Carvalho Diablo]

Ahhh isolation. Great fun that. Got told we couldn't do school work, or homework, just had to sit there and write about why we were in isolation and what we were going to do to make sure we didn't wind up there again. 

 

 

 

Isolation should be like Papillon.

[Magic Sponge]

An alarming lack of authority shown from the teachers, in my opinion.

 

Far too softly, softly approach.

[Champ]

Very different reaction this week watching the highlighted kids in a classroom setting. The tolerance shown towards them by the teachers is outrageous, at the expense of every other kid in the room. I dont like the either too informal or alternatively shouty language adopted by the staff, including the head, in addressing the pupils.

[Champ]

Very different reaction this week watching the highlighted kids in a classroom setting. The tolerance shown towards them by the teachers is outrageous, at the expense of every other kid in the room. I dont like the either too informal or alternatively shouty language adopted by the staff, including the head, in addressing the pupils.

 

Re the death of Tom's brother, have the staff never heard of the stages of grieving?????

[captainharris]

They also have never heard of ADHD, which is clearly what the kids highlighted I'm this week's show had.

 

It certainly looks like no referrals had ever been made for them. Unfortunately undiagnosed adhd will just lead to them getting into more trouble, possibly getting excluded, poor educational attainment, possibly self medication through cannabis and could even lead to a life of crime.

 

I don't envy the job of the teachers, however there does need to be a greater awareness of spotting these symptoms and dealing with them at an early age. It would make life easier for the child and their family, the teachers and the rest of the pupils.

 

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk 2

 

 

[Champ]

Its very odd, the staff featured seem to be well intended but do not seem to recognise that they can't resolve the issues of certain pupis just by being nice to them and without recognising that certain situations require specialist support

[Rico1304]

Its very odd, the staff featured seem to be well intended but do not seem to recognise that they can't resolve the issues of certain pupis just by being nice to them and without recognising that certain situations require specialist support

Or a smack!

[Champ]

Or a smack!

 

Ri....co!

[Jairzinho]

That Safiyyah needs to be drowned.

[General Dryness]

That Safiyyah needs to be drowned.

 

I foresee a dystopian future, where an enforcer-type fellow stalks school corridors, carrying a bucket of water. As soon as he witnesses some behaviour he deems a step too far, he tases the offender and drowns them in the bucket right there in front of everyone. It may engender better behaved kids, who knows? Just forseein' like.

[Jairzinho]

I foresee a dystopian future, where an enforcer-type fellow stalks school corridors, carrying a bucket of water. As soon as he witnesses some behaviour he deems a step too far, he tases the offender and drowns them in the bucket right there in front of everyone. It may engender better behaved kids, who knows? Just forseein' like.

 

I'd be more than happy to perform this role.

 

It will also be on Channel 4, "Gene Pool Rescues".

[Dougie Do'ins]

They also have never heard of ADHD, which is clearly what the kids highlighted I'm this week's show had.

 

It certainly looks like no referrals had ever been made for them. Unfortunately undiagnosed adhd will just lead to them getting into more trouble, possibly getting excluded, poor educational attainment, possibly self medication through cannabis and could even lead to a life of crime.

 

I don't envy the job of the teachers, however there does need to be a greater awareness of spotting these symptoms and dealing with them at an early age. It would make life easier for the child and their family, the teachers and the rest of the pupils.

 

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk 2

Only just caught the third episode on 4OD last night. First thing I thought about the younger lad was he wasn't going out of his way to be deliberately disruptive. Cant say the same about the older lad and I though the teacher was right when she said he was using the bereavement to basically get his own way. Got to wonder why he was sent or allowed to go to school in the immediate hours after the death of this half brother. I'm also wondering if the presence of the TV cameras had anything to do with his being in school at the time.

 

In both cases, it seemed as if the teachers were being blinded by putting personal conquests of turning these kids into model pupils rather than seeking more professional help.

[Champ]

Only just caught the third episode on 4OD last night. First thing I thought about the younger lad was he wasn't going out of his way to be deliberately disruptive. Cant say the same about the older lad and I though the teacher was right when she said he was using the bereavement to basically get his own way. Got to wonder why he was sent or allowed to go to school in the immediate hours after the death of this half brother. I'm also wondering if the presence of the TV cameras had anything to do with his being in school at the time.

 

In both cases, it seemed as if the teachers were being blinded by putting personal conquests of turning these kids into model pupils rather than seeking more professional help.

 

I'm not sure either of them were....there didnt seem to be any harm in either of them really. Both appeared to have difficulty regulating and channeling their emotions, traits that ought to have been picked up way back in their school careers.

 

Re the older boy's bereavement, like you, I was amazed that he was in school the morning after his brother had died but I thought the teacher showed a real lack of insight and empathy in talking about him 'playing' on what had happened just a couple of days on from the event; a boy they appeared to be seeing on a daily basis because of his pre-existing emotional difficulties.

 

As with so many things in life, there was no control experiment, but it would have been interesting to know how these scenarios would have been dealt with differently had the cameras hadnt been there. (I originally typed 'if' but I cant imagine that they dont affect some if not all of the parties involved)

[Phoenix]

ADHD issue should be addressed by the parents not teachers.

 

This weeks episode was just a usual bitchfest.

[Champ]

ADHD issue should be addressed by the parents not teachers.

 

This weeks episode was just a usual bitchfest.

 

If it is to be managed effectively it has to be done collaboratively between home and school with consistency being key

[Skidfingers McGonical]

ADHD issue should be addressed by the parents not teachers.

 

This weeks episode was just a usual bitchfest.

The teachers would be more qualified (in theory) to notice this before a parent.

 

Have you ever tried telling a parent that their kid might have ADHD?

 

It has a stigma attached to it and some parents don't want their kids to be pigeon holed.

 

This school is like most other schools when I were a lad. The decent kids get left to deal with their own shit and are punished more than the disruptive gobshites.

 

However there needs to be a realisation that school is not for everyone and their needs to be an alternative. Maybe practical teaching rather than theory.

 

That would have done me far better than what I experienced.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

This headteacher is a bit of a massive bell end in my opinion.

[Champ]

This headteacher is a bit of a massive bell end in my opinion.

 

He's not like any headteacher I've ever come across before. Although, I have to say, I warmed to him a bit more last night. He does seem to be able to develop a rapport with the pupils featured, although how he would manage his staff group I do not know

[Phoenix]

The teachers would be more qualified (in theory) to notice this before a parent.

 

Have you ever tried telling a parent that their kid might have ADHD?

 

It has a stigma attached to it and some parents don't want their kids to be pigeon holed.

 

This school is like most other schools when I were a lad. The decent kids get left to deal with their own shit and are punished more than the disruptive gobshites.

 

However there needs to be a realisation that school is not for everyone and their needs to be an alternative. Maybe practical teaching rather than theory.

 

That would have done me far better than what I experienced.

 

Hence it's something for the parents to address, deal with and seek treatment rather than teachers having that responsibility to mention it.  I'm not sure how that works in practice.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

He's not like any headteacher I've ever come across before. Although, I have to say, I warmed to him a bit more last night. He does seem to be able to develop a rapport with the pupils featured, although how he would manage his staff group I do not know

I think to a point he has a rapport but when that Saffyiah told him that she had got into college, all he really had to say was "With my personal reference " taking away any credit from her.

 

Luckily for him she was too thick to realise, bless her.