"Isolation booths" - normal?!

[freegazelle]

Read this report about isolation booth use in an academy. Are these really normal in secondary schools now?! How are they legal? I don't know what I'd do if this happened to my DS.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/children-isolated-for-7-hours-a-day-in-consequence-booths-at-academies-mp_uk_5b33a1a5e4b0b5e692f35b59

People forget pens all the time! In my office of 30+ year olds there was always a shortage of pens. Perhaps if they had been put in isolation for forgetting their pen at school then they would be a bit more 'organised' as an adult.

I dont want disruptive students ruining the education of 29 other children in the classroom, never mind my DC. The idiots who disrupt learning because they have forgotten a pen, planner or not done their homework should be removed from the class immediately. If you learn that lesson in Y7 you wont have a problem with it in Y8-11.

The problem is when schools dont nip these problems in the bud and allow children to act out their whole school lives, destroying thousands of learning hours.

I don't mind the odd forgotten/broken pen. Some are consistent offenders, never have them....always have a fully charged phone, trainers etc. No pen though. Every lesson. Grinds my gears.

There are two types of penless students.

Type A would honestly rather they did have a pen. They want to participate in the lesson, or at least stay out of trouble & not have me grumbling at them. But they stayed at dad's house last night & neither he nor they remembered to grab school bag when he collected them from mum's. Or they lent their spare pen to Maisie in Physics & now their other pen has run dry. Or they've stashed their bag in their locker before lunch, gone straight to PE & then dashed to my classroom without remembering to go back to the locker outside their form room 3 floors away. Or they've had their bag nicked & hidden by a Type B student.

Type B probably do have a pen somewhere. However, they aren't really on board with the whole 'going to lessons equipped & ready to learn' business. They quite like the idea of winding everyone up by mooching about aimlessly for 10 minutes trying to borrow a pen. They aren't necessarily horrible kids in any way; it's just that they don't much fancy having to sit at a desk & do writing. (They also tend to be chronic toilet requestors). If they do have a pen, they will often fiddle with it until it comes apart in their hands covering them with ink, which is a double win - no pen AND you can insist on leaving the lesson to wash your hands!

So I'm pragmatic about it. Jar of pens, on the table by the door. Don't have a pen? Just grab one. Now let's crack on.

This works with both types of penless students, although only one type is remotely grateful!

Yes purplecrowbar thank god the voice of reason! What sort of teacher cannot understand why some children may not be organised?

I was disorganised at school never did my homework, forgot pens etc. My father commited suicide when I was 13 so our house wasn't terribly organised and things like stationery came way down the list.

Walkingdeadfangirl you actually make me want to cry for it was teachers like you that made my already difficult childhood almost unbearable. Give yourself a clap.

Type A still needs to learn to be organised and responsible for themselves, rather than relying on their Dad, or Maisie to do it for them. And also learn its perfectly possibly to bring a backup pen in case one dries up. They are so cheap they almost give them away.

Type B will still find an excuse to disrupt the class even if the teacher provides a pen. And what do they learn if there is always someone pandering to their cant be bothered attitude?

There's also a bit of headology involved.

I used to supply a jar of pristine, uniform biros.

They were treated like crap - chucked about, snapped, dumped on the floor & trodden on.

Now I put any discarded pens in the jar & let it be known that I am RECYCLING & that at the end of each term, left over pens (& other stuff - I have jars of discarded rulers, boxes of rubbers etc etc on the same table) will be donated to the orphanage we support (I'm not in the UK).

This actually works - kids don't give a shit if they think it's school bunging them pens etc from some mysterious & inexhaustible supply. Whereas this way they just take one if they need it, & quite often donate stuff because they know they will be buying new pens & whatever over the holidays.

I have a certain sympathy with the whole zero tolerance thing! But for me it kicks in once a student is actually being a knob about not having a pen.

There are pens, take a pen, let's get on.

It works for me, Walking, because it just ceases to be a thing.

Occasionally disorganised types can grab a pen. Anyone who is using 'haven't got a pen' as an excuse not to work can grab a pen.

Then, to be honest, I come down like the wrath of God on anyone wittering about pens, still, when the solution is there.

It's not so much pandering. More, as you say, pens are dirt cheap. Pens left lying about are free.

My battles are over charged laptops these days. Pens don't need to be an issue.

They were at my school in 2006, they're to stop all the kids egging each other on and having fun when they're being. Punished.

I’ve had a really difficult class this year and have been mulling over the pen thing. I don’t lend out pens, I lend out scraggy pencils. Bonus 1 is that they can’t explode/run out and bonus 2 is when the kid moans about the state of them they get ‘beggars can’t be choosers’.

But what I’ve got is a class where we’ve got to the end of the year and half of them never have a pen. Ever. It’s not that they’re disorganised and forget a pen, or their only pen ran out in science, it’s that they simply cannot be arsed to bring a pen to school and they expect one to land in their lap. And it does. Learned helplessness.

So I’ve avoided penalising kids for SEN/chaotic homelives or whatever, but they’ve learned nothing about organising themselves. It goes for their learning too. They don’t pay attention, then expect me to tell them exactly what to do.

I’ve got a friend in a different school who had a similar class and she bought them all a fully stocked pencil case which they kept in her classroom. A term in and half of them had empty pencil cases.

These kids will turn up for their GCSEs with no equipment and we’ll run around after them again.

So a bit of sympathy for coming down hard on penless wonders.

Yeah, I get the frustration with persistent penless wonders.

We have a system (Engrade - it's ok but slightly cumbersome for recording positives & negatives in lessons).

My take on it is that you'd have to go out of your way to get an equipment negative from me, given aforesaid jar of freely available tatty pens.

So I then take no prisoners with anyone holding up the lesson because they are penless. There's the jar, you know the system, witter at me about pens & you get a negative.

It costs me nothing to provide a jar of discarded pens, whereas I'm absolutely not going down the route of individual pencil cases all round!

I suspect I may be coming at this slightly differently because I'm overseas, in a private school & our faffing is usually 'I need to get my macbook charger back off Omar in set 2' related. Which gets very short shrift.

Pens, meh. Pens I have.

Noble used a phrase there that explains it well, "Learned helplessness".
Purple, you provide them with pens but come down on them hard about the next thing that comes along. Surly all your doing is postponing the problem treating the symptom rather than the cause! Why not just deal with the problem when it first arises? What does it teach when you compensate for one issue and are punitive for another equally as trivial one?

Shouldn't a teacher be teaching the most basic skill of learning. aka bringing in a pen to school to write with?

Walking, have you been in a school - or any modern workplace - recently?

We aren't creating pens by pulling a tail feather out of a passing goose & trimming it into shape with a penknife - they are everywhere. Pens are cheap.

So as far as I'm concerned, if as a consequence of some mishap you & your pen have got separated, I would rather you took another pen than I had to listen to your story & decide if it's legit or not.

& if you are grandstanding about having no pen when really you just want a chance to go & chat to Jack in set 1 under cover of 'he borrowed my pen before break', then I'd rather you just took a pen.

'Learned helplessness' kicks in when you are mithering on about pens despite having known since September that the thing to do if you can't find your pen, is to take one of the ones from the helpful jar.

I get cross about students who don't have laptop & charger, turn up late, or faff about rather than going quietly to their seat, sitting down & opening a reading book while I take the register.

(I have a shelf of spare reading material too. Just in case someone has had a crow steal there's to build a nest, or something equally implausible ).

By the time students get to me, they are 11 & up & know perfectly well that they should have a pen in readiness for the moment a teacher asks them to write something down. I'd rather they learned from me that they should check for their pen as they arrive; should it somehow to AWOL, fortunately there's a quick & practical solution to that minor problem, & it's down to them to avail themselves of that solution.

'Steal theirs'. Ffs autocorrect & your illiterate homophones.

"People forget pens all the time! In my office of 30+ year olds there was always a shortage of pens."

I have never seen this in any office I have worked in. Most people have plenty of spare stationary equipment because they engage their brains and understand that stuff runs out or goes missing. Do you work in an office full of gremlins?

If your son goes to school and cannot be responsible for his own equipment, get him into the habit of checking his school bag every Sunday night and ensuring that he has plenty of extra pens, pencils and other things.

As for the inclusion units: We're talking about making a kid sit on a bloody chair and get bored for a bit, not birching them like in Eton in the year 1700.

We had an isolation room in my high school. It was basically a row of desk round the walls of the room with small desks on top of them on their sides to make the booths.

I ended up there once (for forgetting a textbook, my friend was happy to share hers as we were sat together and on the same page but teacher said no) and you literally done nothing, you could do work if you wanted but the booths were so tiny it was impossible to lean on the desk and write.

It's always reassuring to see that once again people who have never taught (and whose only experience of school is having gone to one themselves and/or sending their kids to one) know implicitly exactly how to run a school and teach a specialist lesson to 30 teenagers and with all manner of disciplinary matters ranging from violence against staff and/or students to not having a pen.

Soon it'll be "I don't know why teachers need a long holiday, it's not as if they do anything in term time"..... Oh, wait a minute...didn't that come up the other day......

School bus didn't turn up after 15mins so dc came home for a lift. Rang school, no issues that they know of regarding bus Co. Said they would get a lift but may be late (other dc opposite direction and needed take them also)
As I rang up they won't get put in isolation for the day!!
For being late!!
Would not want to be relying on public bus service in this case!

Routines like that are easier, purple when you have your own classroom! Not when you are struggling to get logged on, write the title and date on the board, and the teacher whose room it is doesn’t have any pens anywhere, except possibly in a locked cupboard to which you do not have the key.

So no pen means me also having to grub around for pencils in the stuff I lug from classroom to classroom.

Very true noble. I was peripatetic as an NQT. It was hell!

I have a grab bag I take when I do cover lessons - spare lined paper, & a huge pencil case. Much easier than rooting through someone else's room.

These days it has two mac & two USB chargers as well - always some muppet with a dead mac/laptop...

Pens might be cheap but I was getting through hundreds. I taught close to 500 pupils a week. It got the point where I had to stop buying classroom resources from my own money. Great if you can afford it. But lots of teachers already spend significant amounts of their own money on stuff for school.

I went part time to cope with workload, but the pay cut was significant as I was the larger wage earner.

Isolation booths are used for extremely poor behaviour such as telling a teacher to 'f' off, throwing a chair across a room, physically attacking another student or constant disruption-ignoring requests to stop etc... Little Johnny of course will go home and tell his parents it was all the teacher's fault. Sadly, more often than not, parents don't try to find out the truth before sending complaints into school. BTW if parents allow children to swear and backchat at home they will think this is the normal way to communicate with others. The same kids will be very quick to point the blame at everyone but themselves.

Don't have an isolation booths at my children's schools. To me it just demonstrates why parents are so determined to either educate privately or seek selective state schools.

Any isolation booths.

Secondly none of my children's teachers need be stationers to any of their pupils. Another reason for segregating children who can't or decline from behaving in the appropriate manner for a classroom. This means never deliberately forgetting pens as well as telling a teacher to F- OFF.

I get extremely angry for the children who want to learn who suffer from this continual recalcitrant behaviour of the few . The limited resources further exposed by placing idiots in isolation rooms which must be staffed.

I think they are used to an inhumane extent in some schools and some teachers are overly reliant on them, in the absence of better behaviour management strategies.

My friend's very compliant, hard-working dd was isolated all day because the (fairly subtle) red dip-dye hadn't washed out of her hair properly at the end of the school holidays, so she still had a couple of inches of discolouration on her hair on the first day of term

Other children isolated because the school changed the shoe policy and parents didn't want to replace perfectly good shoes before they had worn out

My 13yo was given 24 hours isolation for clicking his pen while the teacher was talking - I would have thought a verbal reprimand would have been appropriate first, not "straight to isolation"

Our school is a "Ready To Learn" school which is a whole circle of hell in itself.

And yes, isolation is full of kids with ASD and other additional needs ho can't cope with the totalitarian regime the new management (I won't say head teacher, because he isn't a teacher, he's just a manager) has introduced as an Elastoplast solution to discipline and social problems in the school and surrounding community.

Mental health problems among the students are rife and soaring. Resources to support them are lamentable. The usual destination of children who are struggling to cope, particularly if they are boys, is - yep, you guessed it - isolation. Kids can be in there for weeks. Their relationships with staff and peers deteriorate, their behaviour escalates because they are angry and miserable, which leads to more isolation.
There's nothing else - they keep getting isolated until somebody finally calls it quits and they're expelled.

In many schools (including ours) teachers frequently do NOT send down work. Students either sleep, stare at the wall, are told to read something from their bag, or given the same worksheets more than once. The isolation room is supervised by a Behaviour Manager in a high-vis vest - that's her only job, she's not a teacher. She goes around school with a walkie-talkie wrangling kids to the isolation room when teachers need her.

I think in twenty years' time we will look back on this practice with the same horror and contempt with which we remember the Pindown scandal. At least I hope we will.