Detentions as a punishment

Well yes, that's why we don't just let kids not come to school or turn up to lessons. We keep them in classes and try our best to teach them!

I don't want to be flippant OP as youth unemployment isn't good, but the UK's youth unemployment rate is only slightly above the OECD average. BREXIT no doubt contributed.

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I'm loving where you went with the analogy, @NeverDropYourMooncup!

Perhaps we'd better not start on flogging a dead horse 😂?

You've used the phrase 'You can't force a horse to drink' and said that they need to be separated from those children who are already able to comply with every instruction.

That's absolutely giving up on children. If you want a horse to drink, you can stay there longer and they drink, giving them extra time means that you might see there's a bloody great carp in the water that's putting them off, the slope to the water's edge is too slippery or steep or (more likely with horses) that there's a leaf on a tree in the distance that looks different in some way and the wind's blowing in a slightly different direction, meaning they can't relax enough to be able to drink.

Saying 'Oh, well, can't make you, time to go' means the horse goes thirsty and won't want to drink there next time, either - when you could have stayed there a bit longer and identified/solved the problem before they developed a complete aversion to everything from lakes and rivers to watertroughs and buckets.

If a child has a detention or number of detentions, there's not just the opportunity for them to learn it's not worth the hassle, they can learn the actual work, they're out of a potentially tense situation or dynamic which led to them kicking off in class and the data gathered from behaviour records can be used to identify possible causes and trends - whether it's around a particular teacher (might be that they shout a lot, might be that they have unreasonable expectations) or the student's environment (such as not having access to the internet or a safe space for work at home, being bullied) or something else, such as undiagnosed SEND.

Poor kids.

Written off and abandoned/kicked out and deprived of the opportunity to learn because the OP can't be arsed with them if they don't behave acceptably.

Far better to receive the inconvenience of a detention from time to time and learn it's easier to just do the work/turn up on time/not call the teacher a prick than to be told 'Oh well, your consequences are that you're barely literate, have no qualifications and will likely never have a decent future. Not our problem'.

I'd deliberately get lunchtime detentions for not handing in homework when I didn't have clubs to go to - because it meant after getting my food, I'd be able to sit in a quiet, warm and dry classroom and get on with other work (as I'd done the work I hadn't handed in already) rather than have to stand for 40 minutes in the rain and cold for four months of the year. Were it not for that terrible deprivation of liberty, I'd have been free to get soaked and freeze my arse off miserably. I know which felt more like punishment to me.

Often because some kids have a level of SEN which may or may not be recognised and supported. Support can disappear once out of education.

Hospitality (for example) may prefer to employ a couple of uni students part time rather than someone with a hospitality qualification from college but who also has ASD and who struggles to get through the interview stage.

So how was this behaviour treated in your home country when you were at school.

Here in the UK detentions are just a normal part of the school punishment, but you haven't mention what do they do for good behaviour.

For example my DC school have the normal 10 mins up to an hour detentions. The up to report cards which are marked in lesson by teachers and then Intervention and taught out of class. But along side this are house points Which are given for good behaviour in each lesson, assemble Etc. And which if the child reaches the set number house points, attendance receive a reward at the end of term these range from a cinema trip (Autumn term) for Bronze, Ice skating (Spring term) for Silver and a theme park (summer term) for Gold.

You can't have one without the other.

And some kids will try their hardest but struggle. They get through college on a level 1 or 2 course and still end up NEET age 18-24.

I think the figures would be higher. Some kids continue to sixth form and still bum around, but they’re not NEET. Similarly, some will get jobs or apprenticeships and do okay, despite having messed around throughout school. I think GCSE results are a fairly broad representation of whether the children in that particular school are engaged or not (allowing for SEN).

My DS works in a school where discipline is very lax. He tells me that large number of the children spend their lessons vaping in the toilets and teachers would prefer that than having them in their lessons causing disruption. Less than 25% of children pass their maths and English GCSE.

You’re comparing apples and bananas. In Russia kids are heavily, regularly tested and kept back a year if they fail? Is that not punishment?

If a child is late for class in the UK, they have to come back later to see the teacher who will go over the work they’ve missed, and establish whether they have understood the rest of the lesson after they’ve missed the start. That’s not a punishment, if anything it’s the teacher that’s being punished.

No, it’s you who doesn’t understand. You said five out of a class of 30. One would be bad enough and spark investigations here and queries from a visiting Ofsted inspector if they discovered it. 16% of a class (even if it’s a total of 30 out of a big school) is completely shocking.