On 25.02.24, two comments were made within an hour of each other about a post I wrote last November. Seeing as comments are relatively rare, this seems a bit of an odd coincidence.
Here are the comments:
1) This is a little unhinged and erring on threatening I feel. The kids LOVE the head, there’s not loads leaving other than normal house moves away etc There’s been so many improvements since the head joined - new library, new play areas, new community initiatives. There’s discos, music night, everyone joins in . Teachers are great. Head is great. Parents are happy!!
2) This is pretty threatening from a teacher at my child’s primary school. It makes you sound a bit unstable tbh. And I know loads of people with children at this school and they’re all really happy, so it’s just not true!
These comments show a very shallow grasp and analysis of the ´whole story’ and Panglossian view of the school under the current head. I suspect that they were sent by the same person, the substance and language being so similar. As the writer of this blog, I moderate all comments. It took me a while to upload the comments: maybe the commentator got frustrated, so wrote a second one thinking the first one had failed to work.
For info, dear commentator(s), I left the school nearly four years ago. I have therefore not been ‘a teacher at (your) child’s primary school’ for quite some time. The head there has now been there for long enough for the current cohort of children there to have only known school under their headship. The point being that children and carers no longer have a vastly superior and caring head to compare them to.
I really hope that the children there do feel happy and safe. I genuinely do. However, it is a fact -not an opinion- that many families did not feel happy with the school while I was there, and for a long time after. I will not go into more detail about this as I have already written about it in great length in previous posts.
It is remarkable that some seem to be placated by discos, playing areas and a library (that took years to be functional, and this after many good books were spitefully jettisoned due to their link with the previous head…) when staff turnover is such a huge problem at the school. We are not talking one or two ‘miffed’ teachers leaving, but scores of good practitioners year after year. In fact, this situation has been worsening over the past two years (as stated in a previous post, over 60% of class teachers left at the end of last academic year). Sure, ‘teachers are great’ but they are not staying, are they?
Furthermore, by focussing on the school's physical amenities, the people working there who create the culture and community of the school are disregarded - which in turn furthers the idea that all these individuals are not valuable, and are expendable.
As for the accusation that my behaviour is threatening, the posts on this blog are anonymised. It is an exercise in catharsis. No one is forced to read it. I am genuinely curious as to how these concerned parents chanced upon it and even more so, why they chose to interact with it.
Finally, accusations of being ‘unhinged’ and ‘unstable’ are distasteful and contribute to the stigmatisation of people suffering from mental health issues. While I sadly understand people’s naive and unquestioning loyalty to a manipulative head, I will not tolerate mental health abuse. It is a fact that this person pushed me to a nervous breakdown, followed by a 200% increase in antidepressants, and years of therapy. The mental health of many other previous members of staff has similarly suffered greatly at the school (or indeed at other schools). Such an insensitive attitude to victims is not a good look.
