A teacher who resigned over pupil behaviour says staff are being driven out the classroom in droves by unruly kids and an outdated "Victorian" education system. Elo Ajise, 50, has been a supply teacher since September 2005.
She became a full-time teacher in September 2018, but quit after only a term in December 2018. She said the last straw was when she found out pupils had been allegedly filming her at school and uploading it on social media.
The divorced mum of two from Wavertree, Liverpool, now covers staff sickness in schools across the region. She says standards have slipped so much she finds herself teaching maths and English to kids who don't know the days of the week.
And the "power struggle" between helpless senior teaching staff and unruly pupils means lessons are often abandoned due to misbehaviour. She thinks the answer is to totally overhaul the curriculum - to focus more on "useful" learning - like cooking, business and enterprise - and not "abstract" concepts like algebra.
Elo, who also works as a private tutor for kids re-sitting GCSE maths and English, said: "The system is so Victorian. We have moved on hundreds of years. We are competing with China and Singapore where they have a very different attitude to education.
"Our society is in a different category. For example, I am in a special school covering maths and English and you have got secondary school age kids that don't know the days of the week.
"Teachers are filling in the students answers because kids are not understanding what they are supposed to be learning. GCSEs are going over these children's heads.
"Children are having to repeat their GCSEs in maths and English at least nine times whilst taking A Levels because up to a third of students fail to get to a grade four at GCSE. Some of them are going on to get A Levels, but they are having to drag re-sits for maths and English along with them.
"Some people struggle with maths, but without that they can't get to university. Is that really a good idea?"
She says she encounters children in special schools who can't even tell the time. “My heart breaks watching kids struggling to tell the time,” she said.
“I wish I had a camera and someone could just see the lack of learning that takes place every single day.”
She said that she often contemplates leaving the classroom due to the level of disruption. “I once left the classroom because the disruption was so bad," she said.
"There was one student running around the classroom, messing around. Management came in and tried to take the children out, but he refused, and I was told us to stop the lesson and take the whole class to a different classroom because the boy refused to leave.
"You see this quite often - management come in and there is a power struggle. Compare this to other societies where that level of disrespect wouldn't happen, and yet we still expect the same results.
“I just thought I can’t keep doing this. I got taken on in a permanent role at a college. They sold the position to me as kids who are keen to do their GCSEs because they were doing vocational courses
“These kids had been kicked out of so many places: the kids didn’t care. Three strikes and they were out. Nobody can get rid of them because the college is responsible for paying wherever they send them to.
“Equipment was being destroyed, and there was no structure or management of the college. Kids were refusing to work and they were breaking stuff in front of management.
“There was one time I left the classroom because the disruption was so bad. Students were in and out, running around the classroom, and messing around.
"They told us to stop the lesson. I just thought I can’t keep doing this. Before I resigned, one of the students told me that other students had been filming me and putting it on social media.
"Staff and students had to use the same male and female toilets, so if I am being filmed in the classroom my imagination is running all over the place if I'm sharing toilets with teenage boys. That was the first thing which came to my mind. That was one of the deciding factors to say I'm not staying here. That was the last permanent role I had and since then I have just been doing supply.
"She said that the root problem of bad behaviour lies with the way the education system is structured because they are learning abstract concepts, not things which are useful for them day to day. There is zero value for them, and therefore they have zero interest.
“The schools are not helping anybody,” she said. “They are not breaking concepts down for children to understand. I think the education system needs an overhaul, I don’t think any learning is taking place.
“Teaching and learning are not the same thing: the curriculum being offered is not acceptable.”