Detentions as a punishment

Mathematicians present solutions not answers. An answer can be plucked out of your arse. A solution convinces the person reading it that your final answer is correct.

@SweatyLama It's boring to show working simple problems and the child will start to hate math for it. I am sure you would not like it.

If you show the workings, and they are correct, it shows you have understood the method, and you may get marks for this even if your final answer is incorrectly calculated. If you don't show the workings and the answer is incorrect, you will get no marks and the teacher doesn't know whether you have understood the method.

As for it being boring, well tough!

I have a kid in one of my classes who is one serious incident away from permanent exclusion. He is always late for my lessons (despite, by the way, liking and respecting me) because he is in the toilets with his mates vaping and mucking around.

He recently started turning up to my lessons on time. I asked him what on earth was going on and he said he was fed up of having a lunchtime detention for lateness every day.

When we started implementing centralised detentions for lateness, lateness to lessons went down. We have the data to show this!

The idea that we should just let kids choose when to turn up to lessons and to hang around in the corridors or toilets until they decide they can be arsed to move without consequence is just batshit. "Oh but they'll miss the start of the lesson, that's their consequence." - they don't care!

I’m a primary school teacher and every school I’ve worked in does detentions.

Whats your alternative suggestion? Or do you want them to just get away with bad behaviour?

You say primary schools are different, but in primary schools firstly of course the children are younger and most want the approval of the adults in their life and haven’t yet developed stroppy teenage attitudes. It’s like saying "my eight-year-old does what I tell him so why won’t my fifteen-year-old?"

Secondly, in primary schools children are usually taught by just one or two main teachers over the course of a week, and develop a relationship with them. In secondary schools it is very different, with pupils often having a different specialist teacher for each of, say, ten subjects. The teachers may teach a couple of hundred children each week and can’t develop proper relationships with them all.

As for your opinion that it is not rude, disrespectful or disruptive for pupils to turn up late to a class, I really don’t understand that. Even if the pupil enters and takes their seat quietly (unlikely), if they have missed the first say ten minutes of the lesson where the teacher has given input and explained what he/she wants the pupils to do, what do you expect will happen? The options are that the teacher has to go through it all again just for them, or another pupil is asked to explain and has to waste their own time doing so, or the latecomer does nothing of any value. This last option means that at some point later the teacher will have to take the time to explain to them the input they missed. Why should they have to take time away from others who turned up on time?

Unpunctuality is discourteous to everyone else, at all ages. I don’t understand why you think it is acceptable. Pupils turning up to a lesson without the right equipment or books cause disruption and delay for everyone while the problem is sorted out.

A school is a microcosm of society. Society functions by the majority following the rules that society has decided are worth enforcing. Punishment for law-breaking contains an element of deterrence, to deter others from doing the same thing. I agree that some schools have rules I don’t think are worth having, e.g. specifying the exact type of shoes that may be worn, but if you don’t like the rules a school has, send your child to a different school.

All this, of course, assumes that pupils have the capacity to follow the rules. If they don’t, they may need help. Unless they have Special Needs recognised by the school, the people in the best position to either help the child themselves or talk to the school to point out the child's problems, are the parents. @Unexpecteddrivinginstructor has given you some very good practical advice.

If you encourage your child to think that they needn’t follow the rules that others follow, or even make any attempt to do so, and should not be penalised in any way for such actions, I’m afraid your child is going to have a difficult life.

Schools in the UK are stricter now but that is partly because parents are more permissive which might be ok when you just have one or two children to manage but becomes chaotic if there are 30.
This is very true.

I would love to see the OP in a secondary school facing a child who is deliberately misbehaving or deal with a group of kids wandering the site disrupting lessons. Or try to get a parent in who deliberately refuses to answer the phone to the school or who never turns up for meetings. The idea that schools can find even more money than they current do for additional pastoral support is also bonkers. Schools spend significant amounts on well being and pastoral support. There isn't the money.

Now that your ds has told you the primary school did keep kids in at break for bad behaviour, has this changed your positive impression of it and you now think the children were treated like criminals at the primary school too?

That primary school sounds horrendous.

You clearly have no concept of how a small but significant group of students can behave in our schools. Children who are late do not quietly slip into their seat. They make a huge fuss. They generally have no idea what is happening. They interrupt, talk while the teacher is. They throw things. They argue. They make inappropriate noises. They refuse to complete tasks. They demand to leave class. They sometimes leave class without permission. They swear. This cannot be addressed without consequences. You are living in cloud cuckoo land. Your dc may be sensitive, kind etc but many are not. Without struct rules these noisier, poorly mannered students will ruin your child's education and make it impossible for him to learn or feel safe.

However, it's unlikely that any teacher has been fired for being late a few times a year.

I would think it’s extremely likely that disciplinary proceedings would be started!

Yes, in fact often worse.It’s not unusual to have 3 hour Saturday morning detentions for really bad behaviour

Cultural attitudes to lateness/punctuality vary. In the UK it’s really very rude to turn up later, especially to something like a class or a meeting or an appointment. So UK teens can’t just slide into class quietly if they are late. Not only are they missing out on the start of class, they are breaking a social convention. Which is going to cause a reaction from their teacher and peers. You can’t change the rule about lateness and the school’s sanction for it without changing the whole societal expectation of turning up on time for things. Which isn’t going to happen.

When you say that in your country and in your school if students misbehaved the parents would be called in and there would be a meeting with the teachers and the parents -

This is discipline, it's just being outsourced to the parents.

Many teenagers hate for their parents to be called in to discuss their behaviour. It could be argued that this is a punishment in itself.

I don't know what country you are from. I was a teacher for a long time so I can tell you that U.K. schools do also do this - if a student is getting a lot of detentions the parents will be called in.

In the U.K. this can result in a number of things depending on the school and the parents:

So we had an attendance officer and various pastoral support people. If the parents were struggling to get up in the morning (maybe disabled, or drug addicts or whatever) we'd arrange for pastoral support to ring every morning to check on them.

In some cases we'd give the child a lift to school in the school minibus (so send someone round to collect them).

Is there no disability or drug addiction in your country or was it just not at your school?

If it turned out that the parents and kid were getting up on time but the kid wasn't making it to school on time then suggestions would be made to help. For example one very intellectually retarded father (single parent) had heard that at secondary school students should make their own way to and from school. We weren't his catchment school so he was expecting his son aged 11 to walk over an hour through a city he didn't know to get to school. His son was frequently late and often got lost.

We put school transport in place to help the kid.

In some cases the teens were late or not attending because they were selling drugs or being used as drugs mules (county lines). These students absolutely did not come into class upset as their punishment was missing the teachers explanation,

As a school we worked hard to bring them into school and keep them there as they were safer in school than on the streets. We also worked with the police and social services to improve the home situations they were living (or not living) in.

Does your country not have drug addiction amongst teens and gangs? Most countries do,

Detentions are there to help children work out what is expected behaviour and what they need to sharpen up on. In the U.K. there is more of an emphasis on parental and own responsibility for learning. You and your son need to be sitting down and figuring out solutions

The detentions are to flag to him and to you that you need to fix a problem.

They also flag to the school leadership team and if he keeps getting them they'll ask you in for a meeting to see if they need to support your parenting, just like in your country.

There is neither the time nor money to differentiate. The SEN system is broken.

Sorry, but this is very naïve. Detentions don't work for the most hardened of miscreants, or for those kids who genuinely don't really have control over their behaviour due to trauma or complex needs. However, some kids misbehave just because they want to. They disrupt other students' learning. If you could be a fly on the wall in the average secondary school, you might be glad that detentions were in place to deter some of the poor behaviour.

Yes, private schools have detentions too. They are often stricter than state schools, though the behaviour is often less bad. Having a chat with the parents often doesn't work because some parents don't care, and others will just accuse the school of picking on their child and cla the child did nothing wrong. I work in a really good, very nice school. Detentions definitely work as a deterrent even there.

'Quiet chats' in a state boys school don't have much success unfortunately

Maybe spend some time in a secondary school and you might understand more clearly. I don't think keeping a kid in at breaktime is treating them like a criminal... get a grip!

What should schools do about bad behaviour if they can't put punishments in place??