I know you also work in behaviour and am sure you understand what I am saying regarding parents having a negative impact on their child.
Poor parenting increases the chance of a child becoming involved in criminal activity or them becoming withdrawn from school. In the unit I was in, staff were battling on two fronts, with a hidden force at home endorsing the negative behaviour the student displays at school - the majority of the students we work with their parents had a negative experience at school and feel let down by the education system. This negativity is passed on down the line and the cycle continues. To make matters worse, we also have the negative attitude of score staff who only see little Johnny disturbing lessons and ruining the education of others and putting them out of the classroom at the first opportunity.
A lot of the students I worked with would not have a meaningful conversation with an adult after leaving school for the weekend and would be surprised when we spent time asking them how their weekend had been. Parents not being there for their child also leads to a lack of boundaries and the child feeling like they are in control. This causes issues when they are reprimanded in the classroom setting.
I could go on more about this but feel like I would be telling my granny how to suck eggs.
I ran a short programme (would have liked it to run a lot longer) where we removed students from the classroom setting and concentrated on English, maths and science (with core teaching staff) but also added a lot of art, sport, cooking and playing board games. All the staff had to join in and allow the students to see that we didn't always get things right. Each child had a daily progress report emailed out to parents, with a ticky traffic light box stating if they had met our expectations and a short daily report. If a student had failed on all parts of his report, a telephone call would be made to the parent outlining the behaviour but also concentrating on the positives. Childish it may seem but this worked well with our older students and also won the parents over . At the end of the programme we would invite parents in for afternoon tea and I would spend 15 minutes with each students parent(s) going through what they had achieved, offering to advocate for them in school on their behalf by supporting them in school meetings and putting in classroom support for their child. Each child would present their parent(s) with a hamper they had put together in the cookery lessons.
www.worldofbooks.com
. I don't care how old they were.... You still know it's wrong at every level.
