"Isolation booths" - normal?!

There is usually a prescribed process.

Eg

bad behaviour x 1 - name on board
bad behaviour x 1 - tick next to name on board
bad behaviour x 3 - detention
failure to attend detention - isolation.

They are not sitting looking at the wall, they will have work to do, they are not missing out on education they are missing the social side of education.

The not having a pen, I've been in schools where an equipment check takes place in form time each morning and students are given a chance to borrow a pen/pencil/ruler.

Doing supply I have lost so many pens I have glittery ones with 'stolen from Ms X' on them, and usually they come back, it was worth the expense.

Teachers aren't banning all talking and I never minded borrowing a pen of a friend. Have you been in a secondary classroom recently?

I'm talking about one child/group feeding back answers wide as while other kids talk/mess around. Or randomly shouting out when I've asked a particular person. Or not starting work, then claiming its my fault cos they don't have a pen. These are 14 and 15 year old who never have a pen. They don't bring a bag.

I used to make them leave a deposit for a pen. Usually a shoe. They rarely left without bringing it back. I couldn't afford to buy endless pens. After the first few weeks they come from my own money.

They didn't have this when I was at school - I first saw 'isolation' on one of those Educating SomewhereorOther programmes and my first though was that it looked like an absolute DREAM. I found school socially very difficult, just wanted to crack on with my work in peace and quiet away from everybody else. I'd have been getting myself into isolation every day....

The 'booths' I've seen are just like little cubicles. We had exactly the same things in my university library on the study floor. I loved them then as well. Nothing says 'go away and leave me to my essay' quite like choosing a cubicle over a shared table.

Yep a bootcamp school near me is terrifying and sometimes makes the news. Famously they had isolation for wrong length of ruler or length of skirt .

When I taught in the UK we had this - but it was used sensibly.

So if a student was patting about: first warning, second warning, time out THEN collected by on call behaviour manager & removed to the sin bin.

Each department had its own time out timetable; kids would be sent to a lesson being taught to a different year group, to discourage 'oh all my mates are in set 3, I'd quite like to be sent there'. We worked it out carefully so that the designated time out room was always the one with the best behaved class &/or sternest teacher.

If you were still being disruptive having been dispatched to top set y7 or whatever, then the teacher in that room would message the office & you would be removed to the isolation room.

Time out meant a detention. Isolation meant you were there for the rest of the day & the following day up until that lesson (so if your behaviour had resulted in isolation last lesson on Tuesday, you would only rejoin your peers last lesson Wednesday ).

If you found yourself in iso more than once in a term, you & your parents met with the Head before you were allowed back into classes. If you continued to be a pain, things started escalating towards exclusion.

It worked pretty well. Everybody else got to get on with learning without the disruptive element. Most kids were never in isolation, & those that were generally hated it & made sure it didn't re - occur.

We kept banks of subject specific work for students. Not perfect because there's only so much you can learn from a worksheet BUT if someone is continually disrupting lessons they aren't learning much anyway.

Sending kids to iso for forgotten pens is just silly. I pick up every pen left on the floor or on desks & keep them in a jar on a side table with dictionaries etc. If a student rocks up without a pen, they know the deal is that they are welcome to take one. If they do so as soon as they enter & don't disrupt anyone by faffing about trying to borrow one, or expecting me to deliver it to their table, we're good.

Clairetree - in what capacity do you 'work in a school'? I really, really hope it's not as a teacher.

this is why i plan on privately educating, not a fan.

So you have never forgotten anything? What's wrong with borrowing a friend's pen? And why can a pupil never talk one word to another pupil in class without a detention. What with breaks going, how wilĺ they ever get to know their peers? And also surely a toilet break and drink is important.

And anyway with low level disruption in class, I think teachers should deal with it, not just put a pupil in a booth all day. Its part of a teacher's job surely

the teacher is there to teach, the students are there to learn, how much of your child's education do you consider acceptable to lose so the teacher can quit teaching and "deal with low level disruption in class" instead.

10%??
40%??

I can't count the number of days I've seen it reach 100%.

Pupils contributing to this are sabotaging the life chances of their peers.

I have long thought they need to be brought to account properly, sued for loss of earnings, ideally, and made to spend their lives repaying to their classmates what they have caused them to lose out on.

Why on Earth would anyone object to isolation booths being used to curtail this behaviour?

And the schools which clamp down on the "petty" things, such as forgetting a pen, etc, on the ones who have behaviour under control.

Thankfully, I currently work in a school which does this. In previous schools I have seen 20-25% of lesson time wasted just providing pupils with the basic equipment they should be ashamed to some without. Not only that, but quite often teachers end up paying for class stationary themselves, and it can run into the £hundreds when there are no consequences for forgetting a pen, ruler, rubber etc.Very few pieces of lent out property are returned in good condition, if returned at all - I saw a pupil return a borrowed ruler having wiped his bum with it last year.

Do you want your child to be allowed to forget their ruler, and be the next person to be lent that one?

Yes freegazelle. So why would a pretty quiet surburban town implement such Victorian measures for their students? And what can be done about it? I feel uneasy about the school but don't know what to do about it.

Work not being provided happens on a regular, regular basis. Or there is ridiculous low-level worksheet work. Busy work. Word searches. Etc etc. 99% is a waste of time.

Remember, when I and my colleagues have visited these schools the heads know we are coming and this is what we see.

I think internal exclusion has a place and a purpose but I have very, very rarely seen a school where it is used in the right place and has the resources to serve the right purpose.

It’s a dumping ground for disruptive students. I am not saying the students are right, or defending them for being disruptive but they need to be provided with the opportunity to be educated in internal exclusion.

I don't agree with them for petty reasons. The school I worked at, before finally leaving teaching, did naff all about behaviour.

It isn't teachers who decide who goes in the isolation rooms. It is SLT or pastoral leads.

I was assaulted twice in my last year. One pupil got a few days fixed term, the other got nothing.

We've got rid of isolation altogether. Tbf, before it was a nightmare, work set was shite, computers were vandalised, walls graffitied (no we couldn't see into all the booths) the kids responsible would get punished by... Yep, you guessed it. Kids kicked off because they could and would get isolated on purpose so they could skive. Now, its removal for supervision by slt for rest of lesson, with a detention. Continued disruption after school detentions. Severe disruption-fixed term exclusion. Behaviour has improved.

Most schools also set pupils

Interesting that you presume that the 'least academic' are the most badly behaved ? My 20+ years of teaching tells me that is most certainly not the case.

Then to make things worse, some schools only way of controlling children is by adopting a Rudolph Giuliani type approach This by putting children in to isolation for forgetting a pen !

This totally stupid approach is facilitated by educating the most focused/academic , with the least academic and most destructive pupils.

I think our beef is that they're not being used for outrageous behaviour but as an alternative to staff utilising classroom management techniques which is part of their job. Nothing to do with comprehensive education and everything to do with an increasing trend of schools being run as personal fiefdoms, which is actually the opposite of the comprehensive ethos.

It is hardly surprising, reading this thread people like myself believe selection is the only way forward !

Isolation booths make schools sound like 'Guantanamo Bay '. Isolating children in this manner is 'ridiculous' . Isolation bays being the only answer to deal with outrageous behaviour. This is because the orthodoxy of the educational establishment belief is entrenched in comprehensive education.

Thanks thefifthkey that's interesting.

Just had a fantastic report for my son top marks for almost everything, even teachers think he's great 'inspires other students' a 'great kid to teach' but he lives in fear of 1.5hr detentions for 1 piece of forgotten homework or being barked at for some incredibly minor offence no way to treat year7s. Institutional abuse springs to mind.

A school that cuts break and finishes early has significant behaviour issues during break times, usually. They’ll give all sorts of reasons but that is mostly why that decision is made. A sign of a decent school these days is an hour long lunch break because it means they can trust the students not to misbehave during that time.

At our school yes, yr 11s are put into isolation with no work for forgetting things. It's one of the key points that parents are objecting to in our case. I mean, yes, they need the correct books but forgetting one has much less impact on their education than a day spent doing nothing during exam year. To be clear, these are not students with behaviour issues who turn up with nothing as part of their ongoing defiance, but students who inadvertently leave a book at home.