Taking back control: the case for old school classrooms
We’ve coddled the chaos long enough.
Primary school classrooms used to hum with curiosity, the scent of glue sticks and gumption. These days, they stink of survival. Teachers don’t teach anymore. They weather. They manage. They brace. They beg for backup and are handed breathing exercises. They’re expected to grin through the grind of daily abuse and call it inclusion.
Let’s be honest. It’s not inclusion. It’s collapse.
I don’t teach anymore. Not because I lost the passion, but because the profession lost its pulse. I held teaching licences in three states. Tasmania. Queensland. New South Wales. And I let them lapse. Not in protest, but in protection. Because I will not be complicit in a system that chews through its best and buries them under buzzwords. I will not return to a classroom where spitting, swearing, and chair-throwing are considered “developmental delays.” Where every act of aggression is reframed as “a bid for connection,” and the teacher’s bruises don’t even make the report.
I remember a classroom in Hobart. Northern suburbs. Year 4. I was filling in for a teacher on extended leave. Let’s call her Jen. She’d taken more stress days than sick days that term, and nobody questioned it. We all knew. The kids knew. The staff knew. Even the walls had started flinching.
There was a boy, we’ll call him Jaxon. Seven years old, armed with entitlement and trauma, which meant he was untouchable. He arrived late, shouted his entrance, refused to sit, kicked over maths trays, screamed at another child mid-roll call. When I attempted to intervene, he spat at me. Literally. And when I walked him to the front office, the deputy wasn’t in. The acting assistant gently suggested I try some visual cues next time, or perhaps a sensory break.
A sensory break. For me.
He returned to class fifteen minutes later with an ice pop and a sticker chart, victorious. I returned to silence. The kind that’s not calm but cornered. Twenty-three other kids watching, wide-eyed, learning something very clear. The rules don’t apply if you’re loud enough, hurtful enough, “complex” enough.
There was no plan. No protocol. No out.
We’ve built a system where the most extreme behaviour dictates the atmosphere, and teachers are just air traffic controllers trying to avoid a crash. We call it trauma-informed, but what it often looks like is consequence-free. We say we’re protecting the vulnerable, but what we’re really doing is deserting the rest. The gentle ones. The keen ones. The ones who quietly ask, “Can we still do spelling today, or is he coming back?”
And let’s talk about the casuals. The relief teachers. The ones holding the whole damned thing together while permanent staff crawl out with burnout. Casuals aren’t given access to plans. Or authority. Or real support. They’re expected to step in cold, hold space, perform miracles, and then disappear quietly before the bell. A ghost workforce. Disposable. Disrespected.
We need to stop pretending that control is cruelty.
It is not cruel to insist on silence during instruction. It is not punitive to remove a violent child from a learning space. It is not archaic to expect manners, order, consequence. Somewhere along the line we started confusing authority with abuse, and the damage has been biblical.
What schools need, what teachers need, is backing. Real, unwavering, administrative backing. Not theory. Not platitudes. Not another PD on empathy. But actual, enforceable boundaries. Consequences that don’t take three weeks and a team meeting to implement. A hierarchy that means something. Where principals support APs, APs support teachers, and teachers are trusted to know when enough is enough.
Give teachers the right to send a child out. Give them a space where that child can go. Give them time, real time, to recover after an incident. Not a laminated tip sheet about self-care, but release. Reprieve. Permission to name harm and step away from it.
Because the way things are now? It’s not teaching. It’s trauma triage.
We are losing the good ones. The fierce, the tender, the firm, the fair. The ones who can command a room without raising a voice, but who still have to raise it, daily, just to be heard over the din of dysfunction. The ones who say, “This isn't what I trained for,” and mean it. The ones who leave, and I don’t blame them.
I’m one of them.
And I will not come back unless we bring back consequence. Back bone. Back respect.
Bring back the lines. Bring back the balance. Bring back the bloody point of it all, learning.
Because the children deserve better. And so do we.