'Making an example' of naughty pupils

[leccybill]

I work in a school in Special Measures. It's quite a demoralising place to be at present. We have a large number of pupils who have been given 1 or 2 day exclusions for threatening language towards staff and/or swearing at staff. We are not officially informed who these exact pupils are.

Today, we were discussing how right it would be to share the information with other pupils, for example, in assembly. We have a very large majority of pupils who do behave well and comply, and they should know that verbal abuse is getting punished, and that staff are not there to be abused in this way. In effect though, it looks as though they are seeing unruly pupils 'get away with it', and things are getting worse, not better.

What happens in other similar schools? Are miscreants held up as an example? I'm trying to see it from the side of a parent of an excluded child too.

Depends what you want.

Putting an excluded student in stocks 'on display' in a corridor or publicly shaming them in assembly might make some children think 'goodness me, I'll never do that- how awful to be read out in assembly'.

However, for the student who is humiliated in/by their community it makes it far MORE likely that they will re-offend. If you just want them witch hunted to the point of permanent exclusion it is a good strategy. If you want to improve their behaviour and educational chances it is at best useless at worst destructive.

The DC always know ( I am a supply teacher - I take the register - X is missing, and they chirp up - he's been kicked out, miss')

The children know who the badly behaved ones are anyway. The sad thing is that too often the school seems to do nothing about it. At my daughter's school the head specificically said the behaviour policy was differentiated to take account of children from more deprived backgrounds who couldn't be expected to behave according to the accepted norm in some of the children's middle class primary schools.

Practice at that school is to shout and rant at the whole class and keep in the whole class or punish the whole class for the behaviour of the same four or five every single time. The Head believes this to be the appropriate way to deal with bad behaviour and that she as well as her staff can get drawn to the end of their tether and lose it with all the pupils. The well behaved majority have lost all respect for senior staff and are thoroughly fed up with it. So have many parents.

This has gone on for about seven years and the school's results are now declining. Many many brilliant staff have left. It is so very sad.

I have to agree with two points: I cannot believe that most pupils do not know exactly who the bad pupils are, and have a pretty full idea of what punishments they get.

Second: although good kids are put off by punishments, bad kids tend to see punishments as inevitable, so they are "just part of the job". You could even increase their status by "celebrating" their punishment.

As a parent if it was my child I would be furious if it was my child being publicaly pilloried, and actually wouldn't be happy if it was someone elses child. So it could further backfire by further destroying school-parent relations.

increase their status by "celebrating" their punishment.
exactly!
The only 'winners' in any sort of example or confrontation is the child you is demanding attention - everyone else's time is being wasted.
Whole class punishments are lazy as well as unjust. The teacher should never lose their temper or act in a state of anger or exasperation - which whole-class punishments often are.
Far better to deal with that child quietly 'off-line' away from his/her audience.