Teach Secondary Issue 13.6

student roundtable Tasbir “I really like Welling School. I like my lessons and my teachers, because they’re really helpful – and fun.” Abigael “There are more clubs now, less subs, more teachers and the classes are much better, with less noise.” Mahmut “There used to be teachers who couldn’t control their lessons and couldn’t move on – but now they have the ability to control their lessons, and continue with what they were doing before being interrupted.” Leo “The teachers are amazing – they really help you out. If you think something’s impossible, they’re good at getting us to challenge ourselves and get to the place we want to reach.” Connie “When I started, the bullying was quite bad. Nowadays it’s quite rare.” Jesse “There used to be just one block of toilets downstairs, but now they’ve changed it so there are toilets upstairs and downstairs for different year groups. That makes things much easier, as we don’t have to queue as long, which made us late to lessons.” feel labelled. Speaking personally, some of the work I've done within the past two years has just been on rebuilding my confidence. You have to be confident in what you're doing when facing 30 kids in the classroom. You have to be confident when walking the corridors, and in your routines and processes. There are good people around the school nowwho can back that up. There were previous attempts to put behaviour support in place, but what we have now feels steady. In terms of the current staff body and howwe function as a school, we can only get stronger. We’ve had a few false dawns before, with lots of upheaval and change, only for staff to feel, one year on, that they're doing the same thing again, just with someone else's curriculum documents. We're doing a lot of work at the moment, but people are supportive of it. They know that what we’re doing is going to stay put for a while, because the leaders are going to stay put. There's consistency now. In a year's time, we won't need to redo things, like we did previously – we’ll actually be able to build on what we’ve achieved so far. 57 teachwire.net/secondary C L A S S R O OM L I F E