What exactly is the strictness in English schools actually achieving?

I see similar threads all the time. Parents being threatened with fines over attendance, children not being allowed time off for family holidays, requests for flexibility being refused, schools insisting on attendance despite medical issues that are still being investigated, and so on.

Because attendance at English schools is absolutely shocking so there is huge top-down pressure from the government via Ofsted and other targets to improve it.

Schools don’t issue the fines, that’s not up to them either.

I don’t think English schools are particular strict in general. I’ve gone to school in NI, had a child in school in England and have children in school in NI and haven’t noticed a difference in their strictness. In some ways NI is stricter on uniform and things like that.
The main difference is no fines but that is set coming from the LA not the school.

It creates an atmosphere where children can learn, secondary school standards is the one thing that has improved in the last 20 years

Too many children in secondary schools have no self discipline and can't regulate themselves well enough, so schools have to be very prescriptive.

I'd send my kids to Michaela any day if I lived around there.

Probably the strictest school, Michaela, has got the best Progress 8 scores for the third year in a row.

(I think a lot of that will be becuase of the signalling, ie attracting the right parents, but still it’s impressive).

Re Ireland - I don’t know. Maybe the causality runs the other way: your parenting is better so schooling doesn’t have to be as strict?

A common saying amongst headteachers is that if you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves

a lot of the time it means SLT surrounding a child with no blazer while a fight goes on elsewhere, of course.

I wonder if there’s an inherent need by governments and head teachers to be “seen to be doing something”. Imposing and enforcing petty rules is often a way of achieving this. Issuing fines for non attendance is a way of the govt and schools being “seen to do something”, meeting targets. New head teachers have a habit of changing uniform rules to “make their mark” on a school.

And I think this might have been the reason behind many of the absurd roolz of 2020: a need by the govt to be “seen to be doing something”. Locking the playgrounds and plastering those vile markers on pavements about social distancing (the biggest oxymoron that ever existed) was a way of being seen to do something, distracting us from the parties which certainly did not happen in Downing Street.

When parents stop parenting something else needs to do more.