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Schools are like set up as they are because it is the cheapest way of mass control. Of course, lumping a thousand or more pre-teens and adolescents together is going to be fraught with problems, but to organise a system that put a child's developmental needs first would cost more than society is willing to pay.
Many children see no point ... and, frankly, they've got that right. There is no point engaging with education if it can't give you life chances. What a waste of effort! Social mobility through education is at an all time low, and likely to get lower. These kids can't get to university, so they can't compete with the 50% who can. If they did manage to take on the debt, they can't afford to work in an unpaid internship afterwards, so they can't compete with those who can. And so on, and so on. If all that is ahead is unemployment or at best a zero hr's contract, why bother? They are doing the rational thing by rejecting the "opportunity" to get half a dozen GCSEs if these can't be "exchanged" for anything meaningful.
Teaching is an incredibly challenging job (trust me on this 
), but teachers cannot achieve much against the flow of society. Teachers are not to blame for how society is set up or how it operates. They just do their best with what is.
I do believe that teachers nowadays have a harder job.
A lot of red tape is involved nowadays. They have to produce more paperwork than the woods can manage. That they still have time to teach is sometimes a miracle. Some go for the job as it gives a lot of holidays and the pay isn't too bad, but lots of young adults I know who want to become teachers want to make a difference.
My future son in law is a teacher now at a school which has a bad reputation. He did teach for a while in a private school and he told me that the differences in the attitude of the students are miles apart.
He said it was easy to teach at the private school. The kids were polite, did their work, worked hard to get top grades and looked presentable. At his present school he has been attacked, threatened, sworn at, by students and parents. He's touch enough to handle it all, but it frustrates him as he so wants better for these kids.
He does have a the ability to keep the balance between being understanding and caring and putting his foot down when needed, but the restrictions nowadays on teachers to discipline the kids do play a big role in the whole situation. Their hands are often tied.
He mentioned that the children in the private school were being pushed by their parents to perform well. They were being brought up more strict and were expected to end up at University, followed by a decent career. Of course there is more to it. The classes were small, so more one to one attention. These kids had all the support they could get as money was never an object. They were well fed; not some nasty school dinners without any nutrition whatsoever or chippy for their tea. They had money for after school activities, like sports or music lessons, keeping them off the streets. After the holidays all of them would have been abroad to further their horizons, and not to Benidorm.
So they do come from a different world. They do not have to fight for survival as some of the less privileged children have to. It breeds a different attitude a different mentality.
Overcrowded classrooms, the amount of children that have learning difficulties nowadays (tested or not...) or language barriers don't help the situation. Teachers are not trained to deal with all that, they are trained to teach a subject. They are not counsellors, they are not multi lingual, they are not multi cultural experts, not super humans, and no one can expect them to be.
As I said earlier, it's not one thing that needs to change, it's a whole lot of stuff.
When I was a kid, you was brought up not only by your parents, but by your whole community. This meant that a neighbour would tell you off if you did something wrong, a grandparent would give you a clip around the ear when you wasn't polite etc...It wasn't just the parents role or that of the teachers, it was the society around you that had a lot to do with how you grew up and it was accepted by everyone in those days. It didn't mean there were no bad apples, there always were and always will be.
If you tell a child off in the street now for littering, you do take the chance of getting a mouth full of abuse, while when I was a kid you was afraid that a neighbour would tell your parents...as you knew you would be in trouble if they did.
So then we come to changing values. In a changing world, values will change and I'm sure we are all aware of that. Also the values of every group in society are different, as their needs are different.
Now to cater for all these needs would become impossible, so set rules have to be implemented.
And there we get into problems. Every group could have their objections as they might feel it doesn't apply to them and they don't need to adhere to those rules. So how do we solve this?
Add an army of special needs teachers, counsellors, dietitians, police in the school yard?
All this is already being done and I personally don't see any improvement (not as yet anyway).
So what can we do as a society as a whole to make changes that would benefit all? Because isn't that what we are all aiming for?
Cutting benefits isn't the answer, it just creates a bigger gap and makes people desperate. Wars are fought all over the world because of it. Desperate people do desperate things.
So maybe we can put our heads together (instead of being at loggerheads) and look what can be done. We have an intelligent and diverse crowd on here, so lets brainstorm a bit (more) and see if we can agree to some things that can be done to create a better situation for all involved. Everyone has already given some personal opinions, but maybe we can come up with a clear list that works for everyone. Lets try to walk in someone else's shoes and see it from all perspectives, not just our own. Who knows, we might come up with the Holy Grail for a peaceful society. 
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