We had the school from hell at the museum today. It wasn't that the children were particularaly bad, as that the teachers and other adult helpers were totally disorganised, and the children deserve better than that.

These excursions cost the school and the parents quite a lot of money: it seems to me that the very least the teachers can do is to make sure that the children get the very most out of the experience. This includes doing the necessary preparation. It means preparing the adult helpers and making sure that they are fully briefed, not letting them slope off for a quiet smoke leaving me to drag in another museum education assistant who had come in to observe an unfamiliar workshop to look after one of the groups so that the children wete not left to their own devices. It means making sure that the group is properly equipped with sufficient pencils, clip boards etc., and that borrowed ones are counted out and counted back. It means handing out the workbooks and not stuffing them in your handbag. Why? What did she think she was supposed to do with 24 workbooks? Which part of "Please give these out to the children" was too difficult to understand.

Why did they take all 49 children down to the lobby to visit the loo simultaneously to the great inconvenience of other museum users who could neither get in or get out of the museum? Why did they bring two groups on the same day if they could not be bothered to do the preparation for the group doing the self guide? - you can't have two dozen unruly 8 year olds rampaging round a museum virtually unsupervised for a whole morning or afternoon.

And some of the children had the attention span of goldfish! You expect the four and five year olds to wander off the point, but by the time they reach KS2 children should really be able to concentrate on what they are doing for five minutes together without getting up and wandering off. I don't blame the children: if they are accustomed to undirected muddle from the teachers, then what is there for them to learn to concentrate on? I don't care for excuses about them coming from a difficult area: it's only a difficult area by the standards of a small Lincolnshire town, not some terrible crime-ridden urban jungle where family life has totally broken down.

FRIDAY
Dianne and I took the Florence Nightingale workshop to the school with the neighbouring (and probably slightly poorer) catchment area. Here the teachers were completely on the ball and the slightly younger children were both excited and interested in a much looked-forward to visit.