Harsh punishment at primary school complaint

[Kasiapol28]

Hi there, sorry for the long thread...

I am after some advice on how to proceed with the school. My son ( 11 yo, year 6 ) is a bright boy and does well at school, even passing the grammar test for a local school. He has had 2 parents meeting so far this year and at everyone his teacher has praised him on behaviour and his work. No issues mentioned.

His heart is in sport, he plays football out of school and and this year he was chosen to be a sports ambassador at the school ( along with 60 others ) which meant he was able to to go to football tournaments, athletics..e.t.c .

Although the selection for teams is meant to be fair for everyone, the same 6 boys always get chosen and then the spares picked from the rest of the kids. These 6 boys are very close friends with my son.

However since January the school have been excluding him from certain sports events due to 'behaviour issues'.

On both occasions the school did not even bother to contact me to tell me that my son had been excluded from the events and at no point did they contact me to tell me they were having concerns with his behaviour. So obviously I was very taken aback by this. How can I work with him on his so called ' low disruption behaviour' as they called it , if I don't even know it is happening.

I wrote to the headteacher as I felt this was a very harsh punishment, to which he even replied that although he felt my child's behaviour was not extreme he was not following the school values and so the punishment stayed.

The reason he was not allowed to attend the latest event was because he was not tucking his shirt in, had not worn a tie on one occasion, and was causing ' low Distribution in class' year leaders words.

The issue is that they chose to announce who was going to the event on Monday of SATS week and the event was happening on that Friday which was also meant to be a celebration day at the school for finishing SATS with bouncy castles and all sorts. This caused a lot of necessary stress during what is a hard time for him during SATS week.

When my son heard the news that he was not picked and his group of friends were going to the event he was heartbroken. It has effected him all week and he has been in tears and feels left out and will not have anyone to share the celebrations with. I have not sent him into school today as he was so upset last night, seeing him in tears like that broke my heart, he is a good boy, doesn't swear at teachers or hurt kids, I just feel heartbroken for him.

Is it just me or does that seem rather extreme punishment ? Surely missing some lunch/ play or even a phone call to me so I could help him work at it would have been enough for this type of behaviour ?

So he didn’t get chosen for a team.
That happens with sports teams - and it sounds like a small fraction of the 60 sports ambassadors are going.
Perhaps it wasn’t so much a punishment as a “Well, if you want to be picked next time it’ll help if you improve your behaviour, little Jimmy has worked really hard and is also good at sport so he gets the chance this time”. Why should the kid who is getting to go and also presumably loves sport AND has worked hard on behaving well miss out so your kid can go?
And it doesn’t exactly sound like a harsh punishment from the teacher’s perspective if he’s staying at school to go on bouncy castles even if his best mates aren’t there (what if they’d been poorly?)
I can get disappointment as a reaction but heartbroken? From both of you? Maybe a chat about learning to cope with disappointment (which I would expect to be a normal part of participating in competing sports!) might help you both.

Thanks, he was told that they were going to pick him

So will OP. I understand being sad for your child. My dd has had a really hard few years health grief and unfortunately dv then abandonedby her father and his family. . She should be at her leavers ceremony tonight. She's not because she refused to do her work thru the year. This is a school I paid tuition for 8 years. But no matter the circumstances she chose not to do what she needed so the school doled out the punishment. My heart hurts for her but she needs to learn this lesson and i support the school 100%. Your son needs to learn actions have consequences.

Why should OP not expect to be told when that is literally what the teacher agreed to do? It's not as if she's asking the teacher to tell her every time he does something wrong, but to let her know if his previously good behaviour deteriorates again so that he is at risk of more serious punishment. If the teacher spend 15 minutes on one call or email, surely it's worth it if it nips the behaviour in the bud? Otherwise she'll be spending a hell of a lot longer than 15 minutes dealing with the consequences.

OP's child had a migraine and she kept him off school. Is there some sort of problem with that?

I think if they had said unfortunately you didn't get picked on this occasion that would have been understandable. Tough obviously and something all kids have to learn fine with that.

Its the fact that they specifically said it was because of his behaviour and he had no idea that he would miss out due to that.

But then he failed on one of the selection criteria. If he'd suddenly forgotten how to kick a ball/run in a straight line/hit a golf ball they wouldn't have picked him either.

They were telling him that he's there on the sport side but needs to improve on the behaviour side of things (an important part of sportsmanship) in order to get selected. This is just as useful as telling a rugby player that he was nearly selected on the back of his passing but his tackling isn't quite up to scratch.

Its the fact that they specifically said it was because of his behaviour and he had no idea that he would miss out due to that
That’s tough, to be brutally honest.
He has to learn to behave properly for it’s own sake, not just because he’s threatened with losing a very specific thing he wants.
He’s about to start secondary school, he’s not a toddler.

Kasia, some schools have very strict uniform rules and are taking it very very seriously as if it was a life and death thing. Honestly, don't worry about it so much. You are causing unnecessary stress to yourself getting involved in a thread full of mean responses. Glowa do gory;)

Yes but he could have been given the chance to be chosen if the school had told him that if he didn't buckle up his ideas quickly he won't get chosen. So there's a difference I think, thanks for your reply

I would expect any sensible teacher to use lower level punishments first, and only progress to this if they don't work. I'm thinking of things like extra work, missing break times, being made to do boring tasks instead, detentions etc. Sure, if those don't get the message home, go for the punishment that really hurts. Given that this has only allegedly been an issue since March, and part of that time included the holidays and SATs, it sounds like we're talking about two or three weeks at most. So it seems pretty clear that the school hasn't tried that, not least because they wouldn't have had time.

You do not seem to grasp the amount of time teachers spend on low level disruptive behaviour instead of teaching children that really do want to learn and aren’t arsing around.

Then why not dash off a quick email to the parents to ask them to sort it out? The teacher knows this child's parents will do that, because they've done it before. That way the teacher won't have to deal with the disruption any more.

You don't have to scroll through hundreds of posts. MN make it really easy for you to pick out the OP's posts. So being lazy, not bothering to read them, diving in an criticising without checking you know all the relevant facts is pretty rude.

Would you seriously send a child with a migraine into school?

Op said his mental health was impacted by his distress at the punishment (in addition to the migraine).

And? The fact remains he had a migraine. When I had migraines as a child I couldn't get up off the horizontal. No school would have thanked my mother for sending me in.

Was there a limit on numbers? If you had known and he'd behaved himself and got the place would another child have missed out, maybe a child who was behaving himself all the time?

Yes but the migraine was caused by the upset. The upset that instead of playing sport with his friends he would have to go to the celebration day and play on bouncy castles.

The upset is completely disproportionate and reading OP's posts I'm not convinced she tried to help her son manage his emotions about this last night.

Yes but he could have been given the chance to be chosen if the school had told him that if he didn't buckle up his ideas quickly he won't get chosen.

He has been told to buck up!

No problem with keeping him off for a migraine but the op said she would have kept him off anyway.

As for contacting parents for low level disruption, some simply won’t have it that their child does such a thing, some others completely minimise the problem. If I contacted every parent for every incident of low level disruption I’d never bloody stop.

Its the fact that they specifically said it was because of his behaviour and he had no idea that he would miss out due to that.

He shouldn't need to have a heads-up in advance about specific consequences in order to realise that he should behave well in class. Having privileges withdrawn is a pretty normal consequence of poor behaviour.

I just felt that it would have been fairer if he had been given a warning, it was too harsh. If he had been given a warning and still misbehaved the consequence would have been fair

But it sounds like this is a case of persistent low-level disruption. The teacher will probably have been telling him off about it every time it happens, and he clearly hasn't stopped it. Surely that is warning enough? Eventually you have to expect consequences

I suppose I could ask how you would feel if you had to attend an event that had bouncy castles but you had no one to enjoy them with as all your friends were out doing something else. Would that upset you ?I think it would upset a lot of children. If he had just one friend left behind from the group it would have made a difference but unfortunately he had none and the thought of going in to enjoy a day like that on his own what distressing for him.

I think children should be aware that what level of consequence they can expect, isn't that why there are different levels ? I don't think it should go from 0 to 100

Or perhaps he could understand that this is the consequence of his actions. It’s not like the other child in the class are strangers, just that his group (who seem to enjoy chatting about how disruptive they’ve been in class) are somewhere else.

Hopefully it’s enough of a wake-up call to correct his behaviour, op 🤷🏻‍♀️
Actions have consequences.
Time he realised.

yes this is slightly different though as we had already made a plan with the school that they would contact us if his behaviour changed. He was not usually causing Low level disruption.