No Quite Rooms for Primary Schools in Russia

Nationally we’re seeing in these years far more highly disruptive behaviour in younger children. All primary school teachers and special educators in Smolensk say they have disruptive children in their class. Those kids who behave well most of the time also have their lapses. Teachers say that dealing with bad behaviour fre­quently gets in the way with teaching. Bad children being verbally and physically aggressive regularly disrupt classes refus­ing to to do what the teacher says. But few teachers will talk openly about violence and disruption they face. If you do so, you will be quite clearly put around that you are a trouble maker.

It stands to reason that if these children with conduct disorders were taken away from the mainstream class, the mainstream class could function prop­erly. But, as I have already said, teachers feel they can’t actually talk openly, so such children are not excluded from school.

Although teachers report aggressive behaviour is more often a problem with boys, girls too can be hard to handle. I had a child in year 2. She would swear, she would punch and hit children next to her, kicking off so bad that chairs were being turned over. She was under tables, over tables, completely unpredictable. And sometimes when she was playing it wasn’t what we call ‘nice play’. Can you imagine a child like that being in the class and your child being in there frightened and scared of her?

Smolensk is one of Russia’s most western cities. With high levels of drug and alcohol misuse, violence and unemployment it’s perhaps not surprising that children are bringing issues to school that affect their behaviour.

The head of the educational area cannot alone reinforce good behaviour. But what special here is that the staff has no specific responsibilities for ‘key’ children needing particular help. In practice classroom teachers and schools in general are simply devoted to areas with dining tables where children get the attention they need to overcome the immediate problems and come down. Schools simply cannot afford pastoral care teams, family workers, behavioural support assistant, and the quite room or the ‘bib room’ - an empty space with bare walls and no furniture to throw or climb on for children identified as having special social and emotional needs.

Full school funding approach as well as early intervention funding are difficult politically because of their long term effectiveness. Bureaucrats do not look way beyond the child’s behaviour and they do not seek to address the root courses of moral degradation with the families and with the children. On the contrary, schools are in many cases facing funding crisis as local council authorities look for savings.

Yet there are proving strategies to address these problems. An investment of just few million roubles early on could make a big difference. But in reality what primary schools have is a bit of a post code lottery in terms of the provision that local authorities make available to them and it can be patchy across the country.

So it’s not surprising that some teachers leave the school due to increasingly disruptive pupils, leaving aside the constrains imposed by poverty and social injustice.

13 Vyazma Primary School

  

  It’s strange how memories of so long ago seem like only yesterday. Most schools in Russia have numbers, not names. Did any one, like myself, go to 13 Vyazma School in the 70's. I can remember a great number of fellow pupils in the same school year. My mum worked as a dinner lady at the infants for quite a few years. Anyone remember the fish tank in the hallway leading into the assembly hall/gym? I used to get to go back to the school to vote. How small everything looked! 

And then 40 years later everything changed. The government’s agenda for transforming primary education includes three main measures: instituting a ratings system (1); encouraging technological innovation(2) and competition (3). If the plan sounds familiar, it’s because they've played this tune before.

However, as the practice shows test-based teacher-evaluation has so far eluded any empirical justification. The best way to game social indicators, of course, remains cheating. In other words, it’s easier to change numbers than people. This came to be a well-worn chestnut in Russia.

Also of note, data-driven measures can distort school systems in more insidious ways. If the leading indicator for schools is graduation rate, it’s likely some fudging and manipulation will result.

Competition among schools and school districts has led some school leaders to find ways to increase instructional time. In many places this has meant less time for children, even very young children, to have time to just play and take a break from the rigours of the academic world. That said, primary schools today are much different than they were years ago.