AIBU about school imposing new sanctions?

[BumbleBeef30]

Today DC came home and said they had assemblies today in which they were told about new sanctions for issues such as having your shirt untucked or missing equipment, e.g. a purple pen.

I don’t mind it when a school has a sudden outbreak of enforcing uniform issues or ensuring all children have the right equipment using the original sanctions because, no matter how silly I may think it is to give a child a detention at break for a missing pen, those are the rules which were on the home-school agreement and I signed up to it.

I didn’t sign up to these new sanctions, which seem overly harsh and likely to punish only those children whose parents can not afford to replace items which break or go missing unexpectedly.

An occurrence of missing a pen now gets you sent to detention for three lessons; two occurrences get you isolation for three lessons; three occurrences get you sent to isolation for a whole day; and four occurrences earn you a fixed term exclusion. Theoretically a child could go to school on Monday without a pen and be excluded by Wednesday.

Before anyone says, I know pens are cheap and fairly easy to replace, but some people are forced to live hand to mouth at the moment, and the same new sanctions apply if you don’t have exactly the right type of shoes. Whereas before it might be a phone call to parents reminding them that shoes need to be lace-up, now it’s an immediate detention followed by isolation.

What’s more is that the school hasn’t sent home any information to parents, apart from an email containing the letter they give all new Year 7s about the standards they expect. No mention of sanctions at all - just a basic “we want every child to succeed and because of this we expect skirts to be knee length, all students to have the correct equipment, etc”.

AIBU to wonder what the fuck is going on at that school? Can schools just change sanctions whenever they feel like it? And should they be introducing these new, much harsher sanctions without letting parents know about them?

I just said that without going into the merits of it it would be far cheaper to fund schools properly, not that I wouldn’t go into it, just that from a starting POV it would be cheaper to fund schools

lyralalala

I’m not sure I agree with that.

Not that that is an argument not to fund schools. We should do that. But we should also have a simple option for students who cannot comply with basics.

Residential school would cost a fortune.

You’d need the building - which would need residential, educational and leisure spaces so would need to be a decent size.

You’d have 24 hour staff, and presumably if you are talking about the most badly behaved or troubled children you’d need high ratios (and probably higher salary for teachers etc to take into account the issues they’d face)

You’d have some sort of security if it was compulsory - which would obviously have to be balanced with not making it a prison.

Then you’d have catering costs - three meals a day plus break snacks and drinks, plus the staff to make and serve them.

The costs of which would mount up quickly.

You would, but you wouldn’t need many of them. I think behaviour would improve sharpish if parents knew the end game was their child going to boarding school.

That may make me a total bitch. I don’t know. I just know I don’t want to send my child to school with bum picker.

Plus there would be a means-tested financial contribution from parents, of course.

The bum picker shouldn’t have got to high school without intervention and challenge. It should have been dealt with long before then.

Primary schools were the saviour of children, now many are just says factories.

And it’s a criminal shame because we have wonderful teachers who are being under utilised in teaching. They are too busy having to be admin assistants, social workers, special needs assistants and they the likes.

I think it’s criminal that children like my DD will be the responsibility of a teacher in a mainstream class. She’ll be disruptive and it will cause her teacher work and will be a negative impact on her class mates. However, that’s what’s been done to the school system.

It’s broken for everyone. And I think there are easier and more effective fixes (it’ll never be perfect) than squirrelling away the badly behaved kids

The bum picker shouldn’t have got to high school without intervention and challenge. It should have been dealt with long before then.

Yes. By his parents.

Plus there would be a means-tested financial contribution from parents, of course.

Given that we don’t even have a child support agency that can get decent contributions from NRP’s who work in the same place and live at the same address for donkeys years that I’m afraid is pie in the sky.

lyralalala

Well, we should be able to. We can put rockets on the moon. This is not beyond the wit of woman!

Yes. By his parents.

Of course, but not all kids have parents who give a shit.

So by the time he was at high school he should have been taught how to behave in school by school.

You are never going to get all parents to be decent. Some won’t feed their kids, some will abuse them obviously and some will teach them no manners. Schools teach kids how to behave in school - and they do with things like sitting on the carpet with legs in a basket, putting your hand up to ask questions etc.

The answer to neglectful parents isnt simply to send their children away from your children.

We should be able to find and staff schools properly but we don’t.

We should have an effective CSA but we don’t.

So there’s no point pretending that if we bring in draconian measures they’re going to be properly funded if you want a realistic discussion about it

The answer to neglectful parents isnt simply to send their children away from your children.

My children have the right to an education. If that requires sending the children of neglectful parents somewhere they won’t be neglected, I am up for that.

So there’s no point pretending that if we bring in draconian measures they’re going to be properly funded if you want a realistic discussion about it

This isn’t realistic. The government wouldn’t consider it. I am just saying I would.

And I don’t think it’s “draconian” at all.

I recently completed formal education (inc a series of postgrad bits, I'm not just that slow!) aged 40. I have NEVER needed a purple pen in any situation where the same learning could not be obtained with blue, black, orange or indeed pencil. Occasional advantage to having more than one option, I admit, and pencil for maths in case of graphs, triangles etc. But Purple??

DD starts reception in September. Is it Purple all the way? Where is the educational theory and evidence to support it, after all its not like I could point her at my pot of conference freebies, they're all blue or black. Do I start her with purple crayola or biro from day 1?

As an aside, we weren't allowed to use biros in school, had to be blue or blue-black cartridge pens until 6th form. I didn't understand that either, my handwriting improved in leaps once I stopped having wet ink everywhere!

I am reading this fascinated and horrified, but for some reason the thing that strikes me is teachers handing out pens. Why? Surely if a child doesn't have a pen (or book or homework or whatever) that is not the teacher's problem. You borrow one off a friend. The scenario where a student would tell a teacher they don't have a pen and a teacher would say anything other than "So?" is entirely foreign to me. I can barely imagine it.

Why?

Because if you don’t give them a pen, they will do no work and that will be considered your fault.

knottybeams

Believe it or not coloured pens have been an educational issue for sometime,
Starting with Red is an aggressive colour and shouldn't be used to mark with.
Hence ink stamp.
Hence ink stamps bad.

This current trend is for purple to show progress
Green is for feedback and its to show that pupil shave read and responded to feedback from the teacher.

www.purplepenofpower.com/

So, take all the kids with SN or domestic troubles or past traumas and lock them up? Oh that's a fucking great idea, Hercule - I can see why you had problems as a teacher. You think punishment is the way to make people compliant when it's actually the reverse - the more you try to bully the people you have power over, the worse things become. The smarter ones will work out that bullies are cowards and entertain themselves by pushing your buttons. The shyer, more sensitive ones will be too frightened of a bullying teacher to do their best work.
I have some experience of PRUs and special schools - some do wonderful work with kids who have SN, and every now and again they get a new staff member who has managed to slip their bad attitude under the radar. By this I mean the sort of fucking idiots who think that severely autistic children just need a 'firm hand' or the power of prayer. And then you get academisation, which often results in schools being run on profit-making lines.

And, once again, the underlying problems of inequality, which have deep roots. You wonder why some parents have a resentful, unco-operative attitude towards schools? It might be that, throughout their lives, they have been treated with condescension and outright contempt by officialdom, so they are hardly going to back a bunch of self-important bullies trying to impose stupid rules on their children, and will fight back in any way possible.

ReanimatedSGB

I’m not going to argue with you, Reanimated. It’s late and you are projecting. Think whatever you like. I will continue to believe that children deserve an education free from disruption and neglect. Goodnight.

The reason this fails is theft.

My ds went to toilet the other day and returned to find his calculator missing. Had to pay &30 for new one as maths gcse 2 days later.

Pens go missing from desk. He's had 5 missing in one day.

And yet under this strict environment he would be punished again and I think it would encourage more students to take others stuff.

And I am not a bully. Nor did I have problems as a teacher that every other teacher I knew wasn’t having. I wasn’t the issue. It’s obviously easier for you to think so, so I will let you crack on.

“those are the rules which were on the home-school agreement and I signed up to it. ”

If it’s not lawful or reasonable it doesn’t matter what you signed up to. If the school can change it’s rules or policy at the drop of a hat, so can you.

Just write back saying you won’t co-operate and if your child’s education is disrupted with this nonsense you will make a formal complaint to the local authority and ofsted or whatever it is where you are.

BoneyBackJefferson
Oh don't. Don't. One school I worked in decided our teaching would be better if:
Student work = black or blue pen
Teacher marking = red pen (it was green when red was negative but then someone went on a course and green became something else and that was that)
Student redraft = green pen
Peer/self assessment = purple pen

But it was ok because school would provide all these pens. They gave 1 box of 50 green and 50 purple to each teacher at the start of the year.

They were a management team who knew what great learning looked like. You could spend your lunch helping a child but if tjeir corrections were in the wrong colour then that proves you hadn't done redrafts with them because 'if you had then we could see green pen'.
Me: yes the colour is wrong but we've just spent 30 mins on it and it's been well worth it for a vulnerable student'.
Them: 'that sounds nice Lola it really does but if we were Ofsted then we would only have your word for it'
Me: ' and the child's... But fine on the policy even if it's making zero difference to any element of learning or climate for learning'
Them: 'We don't doubt you. It's just we need evidence'
Me: wanders away amused that someone on an aspiring SLT training programme 1 year out of teach first is telling staff that the way to solve progress issues in a challenging school is to have a rainbow of pens for when they, a non-specialist, comes round and can't understand Year 8 English