DISPATCHES: BRITAIN’S CHALLENGING CHILDREN
With primary schools across the country being stretched by the violent and disruptive behaviour of a small minority, Dispatches reveals the results of an extensive, in-depth survey of teachers to identify the impact on their ability to teach, and documents the efforts of five schools that are tackling the problem head on. Filmed as an observational documentary, in Glasgow, Wigan and Luton, Dispatches explores what works by focussing on the schools’ most challenging pupils.
Monday 5 January 2009
8:00pm, channel 4
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Britain’s Challenging Children – yeah right, bring back forced military sign up – pack them off to boot camp, but whatever you do dont waste tax payers money on giving special treatment to these spoilt, ill behaved, brattish little swines.
Parenting. that should be the word of the week.
Grrr – makes me so angry! (maybe now i sould go on the naughty step and be able to get out of going to work tomorrow, or perhaps i should write a message to my mortgage lender say that “i dont feel like paying them this month”.
These children NED to be shown the real world.
dammit – NEED!
I don’t know … I agree that parenting should be the first place of focus as it’s much more the responsibility of the parent than the teacher to bring up ‘good’ children. And even if these nurture groups manage to ‘fix’ the children, what happens when they go back into the same home with the same habits and environment? Parents certainly need to be the main ones involved – just like supernanny shows.
But I also don’t think it’s right that schools should totally ignore the issue either. Something like the nurture groups could be that bridge between home and school …
Nurture groups are not new. They’ve been around for about 30 years and were originally developed in response to concerns about the number of children being referred the Educational Psychology Service in Enfield for social,emotional and behavioural difficulties.
Those who have worked in a nurture group or benefitted from one, be they pupil or parent or class teacher, overwhelmingly report the same thing – they work.
Thank you Channel 4 for highlighting this invaluable strategy.
It would be a major achievement indeed if there was a nurture group in every school, both mainstream and special, funded by central government.
Great to see the things being done to help.
Incredibly dissapointing that 89% of teachers feel parents are to blame (however, unsurprising when you look at the survey response options).
Some of these children were clearly exhibiting symptoms of clinical disorders such as ADHD. As a parent of such a child, I feel let down that the program gave no time to such conditions. As such it served to perpetuate the myth that these conditions do not exist.
Try reading this from a pupil perspective:
http://www.addiss.co.uk/schoolreport.pdf
It is shocking that so many teachers feel the parents are to blame. Parenting is a major factor, and particularly so in the cases of clinical disorders affecting behaviour. However, parents of “challenging” children may often be far better at parenting than those of other placid, compliant children.
Children with clinical behavioural “problems” operate differently to the majority – often they are simply not suited to modern society’s requirement of a classroom environment. A hundred years ago these impulsive “agressive” children may have actualy been more successful in their environments which were more suited to their traits, than their placid peers.
I am horrified at some of the other comments on blogs and forums which completely miss the point. There appears to be so much ignorance to the reality of clinical behavioural conditions.