Would you send a complaint to school about unfair whole class punishment?

[TittyNotSusan]

I'm a regular but have NC.

DD is in Y7. She has never missed a homework all year, and not lost any behaviour points or got a detention.

She has a new science teacher who took over at Feb half term, and on the second week a piece of equipment got broken. No one knows who did it, but I am very confident it wasn't DD. She was sitting right at the front all lesson. Teacher has imposed a full class detention every lunchtime until someone owns up. There is no end date to this as far as the kids know. The first one was today.

According to DD, one girl had a note from her dad to say he refused for her to do the detention, and so she was excused it. Today lots of other kids were saying they will bring a note in tomorrow and DD wants me to write one for her.

I normally try to support teachers wherever possible, but I think in this case the teacher has made a poor decision and backed herself into a corner. I am very unhappy about DD having detention every single lunchtime for an indefinite period of time.

Do these whole class punishments ever result in a culprit owning up? I remember them from when I was at school and they always ended with the teacher having to back down and lose face.

As HoD, I always went in to lessons where equipment was missing/broken and nobody owned up to it. To emphasise the seriousness, to support the teacher, to manage it and make sure it was consistent across the department. I would usually involve someone from the pastoral team. Hard to do it now in retrospect though.

Ask - strategies for what? Finding a culprit in a class of 30? That would depend on the crime, the class and the situation so no, I don't recall any specific strategies. Serious investigations tend to be carried out by more senior teachers than me anyway, so it's not something I have really had to deal with.

For avoiding whole class detentions, the usual advice is to let the good kids go. But in this situation, when you don't know who the good kids are, then it gets tricky. That's why detention wasn't the way forward, but I can easily see how this situation might have played out. Like I said, we've all said stupid things in the heat of the moment, even when you know what the textbook says.

Teacher shouldn't have given a whole class punishment. Mum seems to have dealt with it sensibly.

On the other points, you can't make massive generalized statements about things based on one incident:
1 The age of the teacher is immaterial in judging if she is new to teaching or inexperienced in this particular year group (as is the fact she has a doctorate). Lots of people have a career change and go into teaching later in life.
2 The fact that one teacher made a mistake does not mean 'teacher training clearly isn't very good.' But no, it doesn't cover a lot of stuff and most of what you do and know as a teacher you learn on the job. Rather like being a police officer.
3 Teachers are human and react in human ways. Sometimes that means they make poor decisions. This teacher has been transferred from her normal area of work and normal classes to teach very different year groups and topics only a few weeks ago. That means a huge change to her out-of-hours workload and she is most likely fairly stressed - she is after all human. She is also dealing with an age group which needs disciplining in a very different way to the ones she normally works with ,and if she has been away from that area for a long time it is easy to make errors.
4 Giving lollipops doesn't mean she is 'currying favour' at all - sounds more like a (rather weak) effort at an apology and an attempt to build bridges.
5 If we removed every professional from their job who ever made a mistake we would have no police officers, social workers, doctors, nursers, teachers or football coaches. Everyone makes mistakes in their job. Everyone. It is not an automatic indicator of incompetence or unsuitability for the work.
6 As noblegiraffe says, it is very hard to run practical lessons when there are children in a class who deliberately misbehave or break equipment. Schools cannot simply run out and replace deliberately damaged stuff and a science lab needs children to exercise their own self control too. If they can't do this then practical work becomes dangerous or impossible. My job as a teacher is to manage behaviour, not control it. Children of 11 or 12 are old enough to have learned the latter themselves.
7 'Maybe she had a hangover'..... nothing like slurring someone's reputation!

Well done OP for taking such a sensible and low key method of dealing with things. Hopefully as the term progresses the relationship with the class will improve. IME that is what generally happens.

Gosh this thread makes me feel so very justified in moving my dd from a school where this happened too many times (different incidents) and was led by the HT and the HOY. I knew who the culprits were, dd knew who the culprits were - there were three occasions when a whole class or year were punished or screamed at for the actions of 5/6 girls - who were never dealt with.

i wonder if these whole class detentions have ever resulted in anyone owning up?? surely once 1+ detention has been done by the class the stakes of owning up are too high and no one would?!

YANBU to withdraw your DD OP.

I am Spartacus.