Staff are striking for a second day today over safeguarding fears at a violence-hit secondary school where teachers have been forced to install panic buttons.
Employees at Starbank School in Yardley, Birmingham, have taken the action today amid accusations they had been threatened with knives and punched by pupils.
The school carries an ‘outstanding’ Ofsted rating but staff have walked out saying they no longer felt safe thanks to a behaviour policy being blamed for mayhem.
Meanwhile the schools watchdog confirmed to MailOnline today that it had launched an unannounced inspection at Starbank, which began yesterday.
Pupils arrive at Starbank School in Yardley, Birmingham, today as teachers go on strike again
The school carries an ‘outstanding’ Ofsted rating but staff have walked out again today
Today, 16 staff from the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (Nasuwt) staged the second of two walkouts after the first on June 27.
Parents speaking to MailOnline outside the school today said they back the strike, despite hundreds of children being told to stay at home today.
Children aged 11 to 13 in years seven and eight of the school have been kept at home today, but parents say they don’t think the school is safe for them anyway.
Parents have been voicing their concerns for the lack of control in a school they say is controlled by the children and teachers have had enough.
Officials at Starbank School confirmed today that years seven and eight will remain at home
Staff said they no longer feel safe thanks to a behaviour policy being blamed for mayhem
Yasmin Achtar, 50, who has five children at the school, said: ‘We support the teachers that are striking. There must be something seriously wrong for them to be doing it.
Discipline row over ‘Pivotal education’
Starbank teachers are trained in a ‘Pivotal education approach’.
It promises to show teachers the steps they must go through to ‘improve behaviour in your classroom and throughout your school or college’.
But Paul Nesbitt from NASUWT said the union and its members had concerns about the approach.
He said it encouraged teachers to shake the hand of every pupil as they walked through the door and having 15 minute conversations instead of detentions.
‘It promotes a restorative approach. Some might call it a soft liberal approach,’ he said. ‘Some of the ideas, in principal, are good. But it doesn’t work for everyone. We have concerns about how well it works.’
According to the Pivotal approach, the starting point is the behaviour of the adults in the classroom, as that is ‘the one behaviour we can control absolutely’. It states that ‘humiliation in any form plays no part’.
Instead, it teaches that pupils are ‘respected, regardless of their behaviour’ and encourages adults to ‘strip out all negative emotions and responses when dealing with challenging behaviour’.
Its website claims the approach can help reduce detentions, segregation rooms, physical restraints or punitive punishments replacing them with ‘structured restorative conversations’.
The scheme is run by Pivotal Education, an education training consultancy working across the whole of the UK and internationally.
‘A lot of the teachers in the secondary are supply teachers or temporary, because they can’t keep full time staff. They refuse to work here.
‘So the staff who are teaching our kids are not committed, they basically throw a book on the table and say ‘teach yourself’.
‘Even us parents are scared to have our pictures taken to let people know what is happening – we fear the children could face the repercussions in the classroom.’
Father-of-one, Suhell Miah, 37, whose child is enrolled in Starbank Primary School, attached to the main building, said: ‘You can’t come to this school and learn.
‘The noise of secondary can be heard at the primary campus. The headteacher hasn’t handled the problems with secondary at all.
‘I don’t blame the permanent teachers for walking out, because its not a safe school to teach in. Something has to be done about the situation and I don’t see the teachers have any other choice.
‘The school is just full of temporary staff and they have no commitment to the kids.’
Another parent, Shabana Begum, 30, who has one daughter enrolled in Starbank, said: ‘When my daughter first started here, a boy started harassing her.
‘My daughter ignored him until he got physical and started hitting her, when I brought it up with senior members of the school they promised me a meeting that never happened – it was brushed under the rug.
‘The bullies get heard more than the victims here, and they control the school, not the teachers.’
Unions have had complaints from members at the school over the ‘Pivotal’ approach – a training method that focuses on teachers’ behaviour rather than that of pupils.
A parent, whose 15-year-old daughter attends Starbank School, is pictured outside today
Unions have had complaints from members at the school over the ‘Pivotal’ behaviour approach
But the firm behind it, Pivotal Education – set up by a former teacher – points to the fact it is working with 1,000 schools across the country as proof of its method.
How school was rated outstanding by Ofsted despite its troubles
Starbank School received its last full Ofsted inspection seven years ago, when it was rated outstanding.
Under government legislation, outstanding schools are exempt from routine inspection and it hasn’t had a full inspection since.
But in the intervening years, the school has undergone a massive expansion. Originally just a primary school it now incorporates a secondary school, and caters for more than 2,000 children across three sites.
A monitoring inspection was carried out in May 2018, as inspectors noted the school had undergone significant change. The report praised the school, and concluded it had maintained an ‘outstanding quality of education’ therefore its rating was not changed.
The report in May noted that the ‘rapid outward and upward expansion’ of the school had required a ‘quick and continuous increase in the number of staff’.
It said this had proved ‘challenging’ and the majority of teachers in the secondary school were recently qualified.
But it said the executive headteacher and headteacher had ’embraced the challenges and opportunities’ presented by the school’s expansion.
The inspector said: ‘They have led the transition inspirationally.
‘At the heart of their approach is the complete determination that the school must not lose the essence of what made it outstanding: the commitment that the school serves its community as well as possible.
‘To have succeeded in replicating the exceptional ethos, care and quality of education noted at the time of the previous inspection of Starbank Primary School across three sites and into the secondary phase is truly a praiseworthy achievement.’
A spokesman for Ofsted said: ‘We are aware of the reports regarding Starbank and have been in contact with Birmingham City Council. We will continue to monitor the situation.’
It removes rewards and sanctions from pupils and tells them they will be ‘respected, regardless of their behaviour’, while pushing the adults to ‘strip out all negative responses when dealing with challenging behaviour’.
Unions said teachers at one school using the method had to wear a ‘pledge ribbon’, showing what they had promised to do. One pledge tells pupils the teacher is working on their ‘negativity’.
However, Marian Kassim, who has two children who go to the neighbouring primary school, was unimpressed by the strikes, saying: ‘I’ve been coming here for years, and this school is great.
‘If in an entire school there are 16 teachers who are having problems, that should be sorted without dragging the whole school down as well.
‘The children that are a problem should be taken out; I don’t support the teachers’ strike because it’s making the whole school look bad, they should be able to sort the problem out internally.
‘I went to school in London, where the crime in schools was much worse, everyone should be grateful that their kids can go here.’
It comes as a terrified pupil at the trouble-hit school said that she has had to flee lessons before they had finished because she feared being attacked by bullies.
The 13-year-old lived in fear of being ‘banged out’ at the school, where pupils have been filmed punching one another and parents have demanded metal detectors.
The girl, who wishes to remain anonymous, said other children were ‘making her life hell’ at the school, which is at the centre of a knife crime investigation.
Speaking with parental permission, the girl said she was so scared of being beaten up on the way home that she swapped full-time education there for part-time.
Last month, shocking video footage emerged showing pupils fighting in the corridors and on the school fields.
Teachers and parents at the school have talked about regular ‘Thursday fights’, although some say brawls break out throughout the week.
Nasuwt general secretary Chris Keates said: ‘A meeting was held with officers of the Birmingham Local Authority today regarding the situation at Starbank School.
‘A number of requests were put to the Authority which the Nasuwt believes would assist in making progress on the dispute.
‘Unfortunately insufficient progress was made at the meeting towards addressing our members’ concerns and, therefore, the strike action planned for Wednesday July 3 will proceed as planned.
‘There will be no picket at the school on this occasion as the members will be having a private meeting to review the position, discuss all of the outstanding issues which remain to be addressed and consider the next stage in the dispute.
Concerned teachers strike over safety fears at the school in the first of two strikes, on June 27
‘Contact will then be made with the Birmingham Authority and a further statement may be made by the Nasuwt on the situation at that time.’
Parents organise ‘safe passage’ for pupils to avoid bully ambush
Some parents at the school have started organising a ‘safe passage’ for pupils to avoid them being ambushed by bullies as they walk home.
One mother, who refused to be named fearing retributions, said: ‘There are a hardcore of troublemakers in year nine and ten who are enjoying terrorising the other kids and sometimes even the parents.
‘Most of the kids don’t want to have their parents walking with them so a few of us have agreed to be in the areas where they might be most at risk from being abused or even attacked.
‘Some of us have set up a WhatsApp group to organise what we call ‘safe passage’ home. Parents basically patrol certain areas of the streets on the way from the school so the kids know they will not be isolated as they walk home.
‘I personally encourage my kids to walk home in threes or fours to stop them being vulnerable to the bullies but it’s not always possible. As long as the kids know that there is an adult a hundred yards away then it hopefully makes them feel safer. It shouldn’t come to this but we’ve got no choice. We have to protect our kids.’
Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said schools and teachers needed to go ‘back to basics’.
He added: ‘What we hear about in Birmingham is only the tip of the iceberg, there is a problem of disorder in far more classrooms than is publicised. In many classroms the children are in charge.
‘The methods of training teachers are so child centred that they encourage teachers to hand over power to the children, so the children are in charge – the bullies are in charge and it is the teachers who are bullied. We need to improve the teacher training so teachers are in charge.’
Starbank headteacher Satnam Dosanjh sent a letter to parents on June 27, saying: ‘We would like to reassure you that pupil behaviour is well-managed and the school environment continues to be safe for both pupils and staff.
‘While there have been isolated cases of knife possession in school, such incidents are extremely rare and are dealt with in line with city-wide safeguarding policies.’
An Ofsted spokesman said: ‘Ofsted began an unannounced inspection of this school yesterday.
‘To be clear, we took this decision ourselves; we were not ‘called in’. We will publish our inspection report in due course.’
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