To admire the chutzpah of the Bodmin rebel prom?

Jeez at the poster whose kids have had sanctions by mistake and they've refused to remove them. DD1 had a couple of behaviour corrections recently and asked me to check on the parent app as she was unsure how long she would have to stay after school. I could see two for the same thing - just rang the school to find out what time she needed picking up (not to play hell on but just to work out the logistics as we've got multiple school runs this year) and the second the student support staff spotted the double sanction she removed one of them as a staff member had rang down to student support to ask them to log it on the system, but had then got distracted and put it on themself as well.

And as for the Orwellian language and lack of evidence base for these ridiculous regimes.

Try having a child with multiple and complex needs who is sometimes unable to meet age typical expectations due to these disabilities, all documented by their Paediatrician, but who is subject to savage penalties for minor misdemeanors. This is now causing mental health problems and school avoidance because of the hostility of the regime. Totally counterproductive and damaging, but apparently the 'system' cannot be adjusted to take account of disabilities. The 'system' is more important than causing harm to vulnerable children.

Just wanted to point out again...

50% of pupils attending the rebels prom (not sure if this is even accurate) does not equate to 50% of pupils not being allowed to attend the main school prom. The rebels prom was open to all Yr11 pupils to attend. I don't think any figure has been given as to how many pupils were not allowed to attend the school event?

Also noticed a couple of people making reference to Athena schools, Bodmin college is not part of Athena they are under CELT.

Right, but as you point out the problems are caused by a small minority of the students ruining it for the majority. This school seems to have excluded half the students from attending prom, which would suggest the problem is more likely to be with the school and its policies regarding attendance.

If anyone wondered why we have a child mental health crisis....Hope there will be some class actions for personal injury against the MATs pushing these regimes.

If you look news articles for Athena learning trust Cornwall they are a few.
A boy in my son's year was put in reflection all day every day for 9 months for pulling a fire alarm as a joke in September. I get that it was wrong a punishment was the right move but not 9 months of it. Reflection is when they go to a room and work from a booklet that has no link to their current curriculum. He wasn't even included in the year 11 leavers book.
Children have been punished for yawning. A child in reflection was suspended for removing his pen from the paper.
I get emailed an "intelligence event" every time my children go to the toilet. After they have been to the toilet they need to take time out of their break time or lunch time to go for a toilet chat to discuss why they went to the toilet during lesson time because they should "plan their bladder movements" if they don't go to the meeting they get a suspension. I did have toilet passes for my girls to go to the toilet without being questioned during their periods but from September I will need a doctors letter to prove they need a toilet pass. Doctors are now refusing to do letter for all the schools silly requests unless the schools are willing to pay for it themselves 🤷🏻‍♀️
They have now introduced a ticket system why if you want to talk to a teacher you need to request a ticket to do so.
It's beyond a joke.

I just wrote a massive post and lost it due to a page reload but you said it in fewer words anyway!

Absences are categorised as ‘Authorised’ and ‘Unauthorised’, so surely schools could just exclude authorised absences from their prom eligibility calculations (rather than use overall attendance percentages)? Students on reduced timetables (like the young carer in the article) should similarly have their prom eligibility attendance individually calculated according to whatever ‘reasonable adaptions’ were agreed.

My DD’s attendance was 20% the year she had chemo - I probably would’ve gone Full Compo Face in the local paper if she were excluded from fun school events after reaching remission due to her overall attendance record! Thankfully her school were not that heartless (and she’ll probably never have more than 94% attendance due to multiple half day absences for hospital appointments).

Fair enough excluding persistently extremely poorly behaved students (violence, drug possession etc) from prom/disco, it reflects the same sort of consequence that happens to adults who behave similarly (eg getting kicked out of nightclubs/barred from multiple pubs under the Pub Watch scheme) and the exclusion is motivated by the need to keep other attendees safe.

But being excluded due to circumstances caused by illness, SEN or a difficult home situation (eg not always having a PE kit because your homeless family is squeezed into one hotel room with no access to laundry facilities) is just needlessly cruel and does nothing to improve the prom experience for the kids with exemplary records.

I generally support schools that have a clear merit/demerit system but is has to be fairly and consistently applied and the school has to dedicate resources to mitigating any circumstances that unfairly penalise students who are trying their best in challenging circumstances, otherwise the sanctioned kids end up demoralised and demotivated and that leads to even poorer attendance (and in some cases, even more disruptive behaviour).

Cuts to public services/post covid difficulties/CoL have dumped a lot of additional shit on the doorsteps of schools and some schools are doing much better at handling those challenges than others.

Teens who forget to bring things in or who are absent due to circumstances beyond their control shouldn’t be lumped in with the small minority of teens that really do put the safety and wellbeing of the majority of students (and staff!) at risk.

And this is the problem not being addressed isn’t it? My son and his gf are bloody relieved that the boy who has made their lives absolute hell these last few months has been excluded from the prom due to behaviour. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been going and how is that fair?

Excluding on attendance is ridiculous but excluding on behaviour is surely to be expected for those kids who’ve made students and teachers feel unsafe while at school?

I agree. If they have been banned from the prom due to aggressive disruptive behaviour fair enough because they could ruin the night for others , but to ban kids because their attendance has been poor due to illness is unfair.

I was an arsehole, disruptive, disrespectful kid. I attended 2 months of year 11 in total. I was also undiagnosed ADHD, ASD and reeling from unresolved childhood trauma on a level that made the local press.

Our school in 2002 was an early adopter of the UK prom thing- hair, dresses, limos etc. I did go to prom, there was no question of not going.

I remember prom being weirdly formative. The formerly adversarial teachers were now on a adult to adult level. They weren't invested in me any more, they weren't obligated to do anything for me. I was nothing and it was time for me to move on under my own steam. They weren't playing the cat-and-mouse game any more of rebel-and-sanction, they just didn't care what my choices as an adult were going to be.

It was quite a powerful realisation of my place in the world, my importance and of just how much time I'd wasted. It was a real watershed moment.

I'm not sure if I'd have realised that if I'd not attended. That's why I don't like these moments being taken from the kids. Experiences like this are milestone markers.

The only thing I can compare it to as an adult is being made redundant. Leaving a company not under your own steam but because you're surplus, invaluable, no goodbye and good luck card or well wishes or drinks down the pub. It's invalidating and tells you you are worthless, unworthy. That's the last thing that socially excluded kids, or kids already on the margins of society need to hear.

That's a lovely story about your classmate with her baby.

My school (different country) was pretty draconian. On the last day before exams we all came in wearing colourful ties and got told that if they were not removed by 9 am we would be prohibited from sitting our exams at all. It was a genuine threat and most definitely would have happened. And once I got suspended because I drank from a water fountain that was closest to my classroom (40 degree heat) but was allocated for a different year level- they divided up water fountains and toilets by years. This was in the early 1990s. And when a friend of mine was caught having sex with another student SHE got expelled and he did not. I hate to think how much shame they would have heaped upon a girl who became pregnant.

Fuckers.

This whole conversation saddens me so much. I think many of you need to spend a day in a school - I think you'd be shocked by the behaviour. Of the 240 students in my year there are about 25 really poorly behaved. There are many complex reasons why this is so but they still take up vast amounts of the available resource leaving the 215 students who do the right thing sitting there thinking what's the point.

I'm amazed and saddened that so many schools appear to be far more draconian and petty than mine was in the 1970s and how little leeway is given for neurodiversity and life challenges in an age where they are meant to be better understood.

We didn't have prom of course but some celebrations on the last day after O Levels.. The girl who had left early to have a baby was invited back (I also remember big efforts were made for her to be able to sit exams) One of the teachers went to collect her and our class photo has her at the centre holding her newborn. Reading the stories on this thread, I wonder if that would happen today in some of these schools.

Go the Rebels.

My oldest one has ADHD and he has to be micromanaged to not forget things. I can well imagine situations where this goes awry. Last year I had to spend 3 weeks abroad to see an ill family member and as DH (who was holding the fort at home) also has ADHD things became quite problematic with missing PE kit, and wrong coloured socks. I cannot imagine a school being so inflexible that they can't make adaptations for things like that.

Journalists get a story. It is a bit boring so they make stuff up to make it more entertaining. We have no idea why those kids weren’t invited to the prom. There was a news story about a school I worked in once(not totally dissimilar to this story). Staff were all told that we must not speak to the press and no one did so the newspapers completely fabricated lots of information to fit their narrative. They would have loved us to contradict it because then they would have actual stuff to write about. Since then I am very sceptical about what I read in the news especially on this kind of thing. School discipline and attendance are a popular theme at the moment so the press will pick up stories on them and make the most of them.

Good for those parents - this sort of exclusion is massively unfair

Sounds like the right idea

No academies in Wales

Staff should give up their own time in the evening for pupils who have sworn at them, spat at them and assaulted them? (as an example of everyone)

Maybe the answer is that school staff should not run proms. If parents /PTA want one then it should be off site and run by them.

At any leavers’ event, in theory all the leavers should be welcome if they want to go, with very rare exceptions. For those who feel the exclusion from Prom is justified because this is also about behaviour points for poor behaviour (rather than just linking attendance to behaviour point), I can confidently guarantee that in many cases the school are not going to be looking closely enough at who gets behaviour points for their actions and why.

I don’t know the stats for kids with difficult life circumstances or for kids affected by ill health of other kinds- but I know that kids with autism and ADHD, which are both common, are evidenced to be more like to be disciplined and excluded from school than others. As well as much more likely not to be in school at all.

When we know the Tories have slashed NHS CAMHS and public services budgets in the face of so much unmet SEND need, this means is a whole cohort of children who are being punished or excluded and failed in the UK. These kids are being treated as though they had way more control and choice over their responses to the mainstream school environment and its pressures, than they actually do have.

A UK leavers’ Prom is not a celebration of an American style pass/fail graduation from high school situation. It’s celebrating that all the kids are imminently no longer going to be secondary school pupils. It is a chance for them to try out some adult conventions like dressing up in formal occasion adult-style clothes or perhaps trying a new haircut and perhaps asking someone along to be a date for the night or whatever it is.

With the important caveat that for safety reasons, if there’s an evidenced risk of danger to other people, and there’s no mitigation available, then kids in that category can’t attend. Or if the individual kid poses such a risk of such significant disruption to the event that the young person being closely supervised can’t mitigate that. Then of course then they can’t attend- but that’s going to be extremely rare. This instances should be a very high bar.

These kids are 16- old enough to make all kinds of huge life decisions. School are key authority figures in kids’ lives and when they wield their power badly (I’m not just talking about prom here) that has huge consequences for how kids engage with authority going forwards.

My child is another one in a behaviour and reward based system who couldn’t attend school frequently or even for the majority of the time this year due to EBSA. This year my DC missed out on school trips and other kinds of in-school rewards due to attendance. What does that say to us about how the school feels about my DC’s massive anxiety affecting every part of her life?
She’s one of the lucky kids who has got a formal diagnosis.The school acknowledges that there isn’t sufficient support for her in mainstream and yet the school still apply their attendance based rewards and sanctions.

I see and hear from other parents of kids with SEND about of so many kids with unmet need at local schools who are dropping out or getting into constant trouble at school. This is not straightforward bad behaviour, this is the reality of chronic government underinvestment in public services. So much unnecessary suffering for kids and their families with unmet need, so many teachers at mainstream schools have their hands tied with hugely inadequate resources to cope with kids’ needs in school. There is then loads of stress if the kids do make it to the classroom due to a massively inflexible curriculum. (Thanks Michael Gove for that).

So as their only option, a lot of mainstream schools are looking to their behaviour policies to address behaviour or absence issues, not their SEND support systems because they have so little resources to call on. It’s a political failure of adults in power ultimately and it’s definitely a voting issue come next month.

Schools have to write to parents with the reason for suspensions. So it's unlikely to be just the child's version - unless, of course, the school itself is not obeying the law, which is hardly a good look.

We as a school have nothing to do with our students’ prom - they organise everything themselves and we don’t have to worry about supervision of underage drinking…
we see photos and have a leavers celebration on their last day, so we do celebrate with them but it works really well.
’rebel’ proms are nothing new but the insane levels of discipline are

Schools have every right of reply. Where do you get that from? If they had a behaviour problem so major that 50%| of the year group were badly behaved or disruptive they would probably have been closed down by now.

These things become counter-productive anyway. If, say, you automatically lose your place at the prom when your attendance falls below 95%, and you have a chronic or serious condition that means your attendance is inevitably going to be below that level, what incentive do you have to try to attend when you can? Likewise if you automatically lose your place after 5 behaviour points, then it makes no difference if you end up with 50 behaviour points and, again, you stop trying.

Good for them. I hope they have a way better time.

I can't stand one-size-fits-all school rules. A child carer with medical issues of her own had low attendance - so she's penalised for being ill and looking after her ill parent? What point is the school trying to make?

As for punishing children for forgetting PE kit repeatedly – you might as well say ADHD is unforgivable. I thought we'd moved on from the days when children with processing disorders were alienated by school authorities.