My webinar on helping children with severe anxiety is tomorrow lunchtime. It’s aimed parents of those young people who have completely withdrawn and who may not be leaving their homes or bedrooms. It is recorded if you can’t make the time.

Please share if you know families who…

If strict uniform policies are about reducing bullying and visible inequality, why make children whose shoes have broken wear communal shoes which are visibly not theirs or continue to wear their broken shoes until new ones are bought?

Why is this a better option than allowing…

Is it behaviour? Or communication?

In 2021/2022, 39,930 teachers left the profession for reasons other than retirement.

That’s behaviour. That’s what they did. They left.

What does it look like when a government treats that as ‘behaviour’? They’d use rewards and sanctions…

If strict uniform policies are about reducing bullying and visible inequality, why make children whose shoes have broken wear communal shoes which are visibly not theirs or continue to wear their broken shoes until new ones are bought?

Why is this a better option than allowing…

“Getting a 'good' grade from Ofsted does not compensate for all the stress, anxiety and fear created in our school over the past few years - and its impact on our staff. As we have shown, the people who know their school best and who know how to improve it are those who live and…

Making criticism of harsh behaviour policies into a 'outsider Vs classroom teacher' narrative is predictable but not held up by the overwhelming majority of classroom teachers and schools not operating at extremes and doing really well with ALL of their community.

“Getting a 'good' grade from Ofsted does not compensate for all the stress, anxiety and fear created in our school over the past few years - and its impact on our staff. As we have shown, the people who know their school best and who know how to improve it are those who live and…

Shoes and the social contract

A parent has got in touch to share this story.
Her son’s school became an academy last Sept and part of this is an increasingly strict uniform code. She bought him a pair of shoes which cost £75 at the start of the year and he has now worn through…

Another day and another shoe story. This parent told me that her son came home on Wednesday with a broken shoe and clearly needed a new pair. Both parents work full time and don’t drive so couldn’t get new shoes immediately – he wears specific shoes as those are the only ones he…

I will never name a school or parents (unless the story is already in the public domain) as this could identify a young person. If that means you think I'm lying, so be it.
I don't know why you think I would be motivated to lie about something like this.

I'm not trying to…

Another day and another shoe story. This parent told me that her son came home on Wednesday with a broken shoe and clearly needed a new pair. Both parents work full time and don’t drive so couldn’t get new shoes immediately – he wears specific shoes as those are the only ones he…

If school uniform is to give children something trivial to rebel against, why make the consequences for infractions so very non-trivial (like sending them home, or putting them in isolation)?

If every minute of education matters, why send a teenager to reset for having a nose…

If school uniform is to give children something trivial to rebel against, why make the consequences for infractions so very non-trivial (like sending them home, or putting them in isolation)?

If every minute of education matters, why send a teenager to reset for having a nose…

We are very lucky at preschool because we can respond to changes in behaviour with flexibility in our curriculum. For instance, we introduced a daily walk after lunch when we noticed that children's behaviour was telling us they needed this. #EYFS

Whatever the DfE is doing clearly isn't working. We're not going to behaviourism ourselves out of this situation, whatever friends of govt say. I think we have to look at wider issues around why the system isn't meeting needs.

schoolsweek.co.uk/schools-lose-a…

Every time I post about things like being sent home for the wrong shoes, and behaviour apps where parents are alerted to their kids going to the toilet, and teenagers being sent to isolation for the wrong hair cut, people tell me that this is only the minority of schools and I’m…