AIBU to think missing five lessons as a detention seems counterproductive?

My DC is an “innocent” but is capable of seeing when a punishment seems counterintuitive.

This 100%. I thought it was blindingly obvious but if your child doesn't want to miss out on his/her education, then they need to stop being a prick. They are solely responsible for the consequences they find handed to them A students feelings about whether they enjoy an isolation/suspension/detention over a normal school day are irrelevant and nobody cares.

The purpose of an isolation isn't what the student enjoys or doesn't enjoy, it's to remove a disruptive student from circulation so they don't cause further unhappiness or unpleasantness to the rest of the cohort. The only reason isolation is used is because schools have a legal requirement to keep children in the building. If they weren't bound, forced, fined and downgraded by this stipulation, 99% of headteachers would like to tell these kids to fuck off out the school and never come back. Always boggles my mind that people think that the child is doing the school a favour by being there. Nobody gives a shit if you want to sabotage your own education or not. I care about the other 29 innocent children in the class who just want to get on with it.

Well perhaps they shouldn't have been little shits then.

Because that child is ruining the education for every other child. Yes attendance id important, for all the other kids who want to learn but carnt because of one child misbehaviour. It's better that child is taken out then ruining the lessons for every other student.

💯 agree OP. My son was an absolute pain at school and was suspended at least 5 times in secondary school for bad behaviour. He just saw it as time off school 🤷‍♀️ I couldn’t get him to do any work so it would end up in screaming matches but because I had to have Teams calls, he’d get 4-5 hours a day uninterrupted whilst I worked. He loved it. Schools need to give appropriate punishments.

And yes, I know it’s not completely down to the school. We had CAHMS involvement for quite sometime to try and resolve things.

@clary all good sense stuff. But when systems are abused as they were where I worked, Reflection Room (aka Isolation) lost any clout it might have.

The poorly thought out policy might the demand on the 8 spaces in the room were such, HOYs had to book students in, sometimes weeks in advance. For serial offenders it was sometimes hard to work out which issue they were being punished for.

Teachers were asked at short notice for work but were teaching and rightly not on email, so didn’t see it until too late. The room was poorly maintained, full of work that never made it back to teachers. There was never any stationery or pens. Kids were in those “hutches” which they scribbled all over.

One lad used to put himself in there by telling hapless supervisors he’d been sent there but he just wanted a sleep (a lunchtime time spliff can get you like that!) And here’s the worse thing, in a school maybe with 10% Black kids, guess who it was most used by? Absolutely abhorrent management.

They are not always set work to do or if they are its more of a worksheet type situation in one of my daughters high schools they had them "working" in reception making tea coffee etc no school work

This is an example of a school that puts you in “shadow” for four periods and break/lunch.

There is one opportunity to stop disruptive behaviour before this stage. Cut and paste below:

“Never disrupting learning. Below is a list of some behaviours that you should
avoid in order to not disrupt your learning and that of others:
• Talking when you are asked to work in silence.
• Not completing all work that is required within a set period.
• Not following instructions first time.
• Not actively engaging with learning e.g. answering questions that are asked
of you.
• Swinging on your chair or fidgeting with equipment.
• Not tracking the speaker.”

source: https://www.londonacademy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Behaviour_Policy_and_Learning_Policy_2025.pdf

They don't stare at blank walls, they are set work to do.
If the same children return to isolation, then something else needs to be done, but the needs of the many in the classes they disrupt trump those of the disrupter.
None of what you say applies to the situation of the OP's son.

That's probably right, but how does sending them to stare at blank walls all day remediate that? Many will spend the day building up resentment which is hardly going to make them co-operative when they go back into class. It wouldn't be so bad if schools made a realistic attempt at teaching them something whilst in isolation, but they don't. The fact that isolation is used so often with the same children is surely cast iron evidence that it does out work as a deterrent.

But perhaps the real problem is that schools don't necessarily follow very clear rules and guidance around children whose issues may be down to SEND rather than behavioural. The stats show that isolation, suspensions and permanent exclusions are used to an alarmingly disproportionate extent with children with SEN, and too often the result is that they are in effect being punished for the crime of being disabled.

I remember the reports of the case of a teenage girl with severe anxiety and depression who was in one of the schools which has very rigid discipline policies what was using internal exclusion to a a disproportionate extent. After days of sensory deprivation in isolation, she made a very determined and purposeful suicide attempt. She was hospitalised for some time and massively struggled when she went back to school. So they decided that putting her in isolation would be a good idea. It actually took intervention from solicitors and the threat of a court order to make them back down.

R2L isn't the same as being out of education. At GCSE level there will be meaningful work that the pupil can be getting on with. It might not be the exact same work that is going on in the classes the pupil is missing, but it shouldn't be wasted time.

I think the issue with missing school generally, is that a child can miss a lot during a two week holiday, for example. It's hard to catch up on everything, if out for that length of time. Additionally, there will be time missed for genuine illness. There aren't that many weeks in a term, but there's a lot of ground that has to be covered in that time.It's also hard to teach a class if several children are missing different days/weeks. The teacher cannot just slot them back into the lessons without some catch up time, which takes from the allocated teaching time of the class as a whole. You can't reasonably expect the teacher to do catch up sessions outside of normal class time - the teacher will have other things to do.

The most important thing is that a) the child learns pissing around is unacceptable and b) the learning of the well behaved kids isn’t disrupted. The school should remove any and all kids who are messing around in the classroom for as long as it takes them to learn to behave. Their education / life chances doesn’t matter more than that of the other kids.

A child pissing around in class needs to be removed. They are disrupting the education of others.

Can you give the reference for that research? I'd be interested to see it.

But what about the way everyone keeps banging on about how disastrous it is for children to have even one day out of education? Why is it magically less disastrous if a school takes a child out of lessons compared to when a parent does it?

Your child is not giving you the whole picture here.

One point of internal exclusion is that it's really boring. Kids are isolated from their friends, so missing out on chatter and gossip. They don't get to mix at break and lunch. It's a really long, dull day and the hope is that the child doesn't want to repeat the experience. We hope they will conclude that it's better to behave than to risk going back to R2L

@AroundTheWorldAround how do the school communicate sanctions like detentions?

The one where my DD goes puts all points, both negative and positive, on an app and for a day in internal exclusion there would be an explanation of what and why. There's a lot of detail on there, although some teachers are more consistent in their use than others.

I used to teach there though and some parents claimed to be unaware of the existence of the app...

If your DC's school hasn't got the behaviour policy on the website, in student planners etc, and isn't communicating full day detentions then it's definitely worth following up.

Well it’s also a lot cheaper than private school fees too 😉

And, as a former teacher, do you think that removing a student from five lessons was the very first intimation he had that his behaviour was inappropriate?

Or do you think it is far more likely that the internal exclusion is the result of him and his behaviour determinedly escalating through every single one of the preliminary steps and warnings that the schools behaviour policy no doubt has in place?

That’s alright then…

FFS

I’ve been reading the thread and I have a few thoughts:

• It’s clear that @AroundTheWorldAround was not aware of the existence of internal exclusion/reset room/inclusion room as a sanction – which suggests her DS is not noted for really poor behaviour
• The inclusion room is not really related to specific lessons, or IME only occasionally. It’s used more as a sanction for a pattern of behaviour increasingly resistant to correction – or perhaps for a very extreme piece of poor behaviour. One great advantage is that the disruptive (usually) YP is removed and the class can get on
• Inclusion rooms used in this way are very usual in all the schools I have worked in and been involved in. But plenty of YP go right through school without ever being sent to one.
• Most schools in fact all I know well enough (quite a few) use inclusion as a last internal resort (in other words before some kind of exclusion). It usually follows as I say a pattern of poor behaviour where the YP does not respond

I would be very surprised if the OP’s DS has been sent to inclusion for a day for making a silly noise. Honestly. I strongly suspect, as others have indicated, that there is more at play here. I am a bit surprised the school has not been in touch though.

It’s pretty unusual IME for a student to behave perfectly in almost all lessons then really really poorly in one. Is that really what is happening @AroundTheWorldAround ? I think you need to probe a bit deeper. You may not come back to update and that’s your right of course. If it is the case then I agree actually, exclusion from that specific lesson might have been a better sanction.

One last thought – teachers are humans. They can for sure like and dislike students (though I can count on the fingers of one or maybe two hands the students I actually did not like in 12+ years in schools; the one who spat at me, the one who assaulted me I was not overly keen on). But they are also professionals. They are there to teach and especially in year 11, to get the best results for their students. I am sure that the teacher the OP’s ds dislikes is no different. Try to get a meeting with them to talk about this – it could be really helpful.

A 5 lesson internal exclusion is probably most likely to be effective at sending a message to OP's son if he knows how to meet expectations in other areas of the curriculum and is generally interested in learning.

There will have been others in his class that enjoy the lesson and want to learn and had that disrupted by his silly noises.

It's interesting how economical or creative with truth teenagers can be focusing disproportionately on a tiny detail and losing sight of the big picture to save face.

I'm not currently in a mood to feel particularly sympathetic after 6 hours of persuading, cajoling, reminding of expectations while remaining calm and polite. I have been met with rudeness, contempt in response from several individuals. Most of this is over petty issues that escalated over an inability to follow simple routines and expectations and blew small things into major disruption.

School routines and consequences work for the majority to keep the system flowing to keep young people learning. It's those that don't have personal accountability that tend to lurch from one incident to another.

The punishment is isolation or internal exclusion. It’s not a detention in class time. Students are isolated from their peers in many schools as a sanction. A days internal exclusion would include the lessons that the child would usually attend that day plus break and lunch.
it’s used as a step up from a detention or as an outright punishment. It’s a step down from exclusion. Most children don’t like internal exclusion and although many don’t like the fact that it removes children from the classroom, it does enable teachers to teach and pupils to learn without distraction.