Four weeks into covering a six week vacancy at a very challenging inner city school with P6/7s who have the attitude of 16 year olds. One boy is consistently disruptive, rude, he swears and runs away from adults, shouts over me and anyone else (adult or child) as he likes. I’ve been working hard with him and feeding back to parent, although I may have upset mum by explaining how he was just as challenging on outdoor learning, and then the class was less disrupted when he was off yesterday. Her response? “The school needs to do their job and take their share of responsibility”.

Which is interesting, as I didn’t teach him to shout out “I have a potato up my ass”, to shout out “69” and “daddy!” and making sex moans. I’m not the one who gave a 10 year old unsupervised, unfiltered access to Snapchat and TikTok. I’m not the one who has taught him that when a teacher spends his own time cleaning, fixing, and restringing his guitar you pick it up and walk away without thanks.