All this however was nothing compared to what I was about to face. Castle Rock high school (at the time of writing this) were easily the worst 3 years of my life. Had I been born a generation earlier everything that went wrong with my education would have been avoided. I would have sat the 11th plus exam which admittedly was a crude attempt to stream school kids into 2 ability groups. Those who passed went to the grammar schools and got a good education, those who didn’t went to the comprehensive schools and got a not so good education. The point being made is that least some people got a good education.
By the time I arrived at secondary school that system had been scrapped for over 12 years everyone just got a bad education. I quickly noticed that standards at Whitwick had been far higher than it had been from Broom Leys and most of all Warren hills primary school. So the first problem was that the brightest pupils now had to be taught in the same classes as those who could hardly read, write or add up a couple of 2 digit numbers. It was the brightest pupils who lost out of course because the education standard was always rounded down instead of up. I had always been the first to admit that my general English skills (mostly handwriting and spelling) were poor but even I was shocked by how bad some were from the other 2 primary schools.
The second problem is that teaching methods that had worked for generations had been replaced by trendy new ones. Vast numbers of kids were leaving school (and at the time of writing still are) unable to read, write or add up properly. Some of the tasks I was given to do had me shaking my head in disbelief even back then. (more on this later)
The third problem was serious lack of discipline in the classroom, while it varied from teacher to teacher it was very bad overall. I noticed the change after coming from Whitwick primary school almost instantly. It was nothing unusual for a class to be stopped for at least 15 minutes while a teacher tries to calm down pupils who just mess about and disrupt the class stopping those who wanted to learn. This never happened in 6 years at primary school not even once, again most of those doing the disrupting were from Warren hills.
Some teachers kept perfect order in the class while others were so bad they should never have been allowed to teach in the first place. There are many that argue that the standard of discipline went down when corporal punishment was scrapped but I disagree. Many teachers have the option of doing something about the problems but choose to do little or nothing. I seen countless times teachers turning a blind eye to pupils running riot in class or bullying others yet the same teachers loved to make an example of a normally quiet well behaved person who absent mindedly walks into a classroom with chewing gum in their mouth.
The final and probably the worst problem was bullying, I had been the target of bullying since the age of 6 but it was at Castle Rock the problem exploded. As with class discipline the teachers nearly always turned a blind eye to the problem. I was targeted because I was quiet, had few friends and always tried to do well at school. 90% of the bullying was caused by the same idiots from Warren hills who I would never have been sharing a school with in the first place had I been born a generation earlier.
In short few things have had a more negative effect on my life than the three years I spent Castle Rock high school. Behind the smart uniforms, fancy subject titles, and endless speeches about “achievement” lay an absolute shambles.
The full details can be found on the following entries.........................
The picture above is the only one I can find of the old Castle Rock School which was knocked down and rebuild over a decade after I left. My classroom was the bit that sticks out on the far right.
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