how common are detentions at secondary?

[Cocostardust]

I know this sounds like a bit of a how long is a piece of string question but I just want a vague idea of how this works.

my daughter has just started at Secondary school. She’s a really well behaved girl, genuinely very sweet and never been in any trouble.

they had a 2 week grace period where they didn’t get detention then on 16th (the day they started) she came home with one straight away. It was for misunderstanding her homework and doing it slightly wrong. She’d spent an hour of the allotted ‘10 minutes’ on it and tried so bloody hard. She was in floods of tears when she came home.

tuesday her friend got one for helping another year 7 yo class who’d got lost then today her best friend got one for forgetting to put her name on her homework. They made her stay and redo the homework even though it had already been done, she ended up not having time to have lunch so went the day without eating, is this normal for schools?

The reason I’m writing is firstly this all seems crazy to me. Of course the schools should be allowed to discipline the children but for forgetting to put their name on the sheet and misunderstanding something?? Surely the teachers should be having a quick chat with the children so they can explain themselves but they’re just handing out detentions like they’re sweets with a total disregard to how much this is affecting the children.

The meaning of detention has clearly changed a lot in 30 years and while I can accept that it doesn’t mean I can force my daughter to.

she has a nervous tic which over the past week has gone through the roof, we were at the point where she had almost got rid of it. She’s also struggling with the insane amount of homework they’re all getting.

as I said I understand they have to be disciplined but shouldn’t that be for when they’ve genuinely done something wrong? It feels like the school don’t give a damn about the kids and how they’re coping.

on a side note they went from outstanding to required improvement over the summer and part of me is wondering if it’s always been like this or if they’ve been told to crack down.

curious about what other think

No offence meant, it is just a thought.
I know from converting to Maths as a subject the depth that it has to go into.
But Maths was much easier to set homework for due to the availability of the websites, than my other subject.

@noblegiraffe ,

A spirited defence!

I half agree.

The problem with maths is that it is an easy single GCSE if you have aptitude, and an awful lot of work if you try to ‘learn’ it.

In the good old days, it was an easy one to take at 15, and the odd pupil even got away with doing it at 14.

Several in my school (when I was a child, not that I taught in), completed all the content by Year 10 and moved on to AO maths in Year 11, which was probably somewhere between further maths today and an AS level.

But Physics also has an awful lot of content, a lot which has to be learned, and precious little learning time for triple award in most schools.

Maths content/difficulty also increased under Gove so there are a lot of schools who used to offer Further Maths/Additional Maths to top set Y11 don't anymore as they have enough challenge with the new content and pushing for a grade 9.

That said, of course there are still very bright kids who can just cruise it. Fewer 9s than A*s to go around though.

I am aware that the Govian science GCSE is far too overstuffed to teach in the time allocated and that science departments end up teaching right up to the wire or not completing the course. You might even look with envy at maths departments who stop teaching new content and move onto revision well before exams - but that's not, in the vast majority of cases, because we've taught the entire course to them, but because we make a decision to stop teaching them new stuff. We have to spend time every year explaining to kids why they are going to be faced with questions on the paper that they haven't been taught and that this is deliberate. My class last year only were expected to be able to answer questions 'up to the staples' in the middle of the paper and the rest they shouldn't worry about.

So you are perfectly within your rights to complain about how science don't have enough time to teach all the content, but trying to compare to maths as a 'single GCSE' for teaching time doesn't really work, because it's not a single GCSE, and schools will definitely bear that in mind when timetabling!

Definitely make your thoughts known about the science curriculum to the new curriculum review panel https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-conversation-on-curriculum-begins
You won't be the only one.

The thing about gove is that all subject curriculums increase under his extremely poor running of schools.
he took out a huge amount of subjects that were separate and many of the vocational options and slammed them together giving all areas a reduction in time to teach another 1/3 to 1/2 more content.
nobody at government level thought about how this was going to be fitted in to the time that we have available.

Not more than English, which also covers two subjects (Language and Literature) in the same time frame, yet sets substantially less homework.

That's on your English department! Maths and English are both supposed to set one a week at my school.

Another case of schools (oh, what a surprise, this is an academy, too) coming up with batshit crazy policies is this one requiring a medical certificate for period pain, otherwise it will be recorded as an unauthorised absence. Because NHS GPs are not already overstretched, so this is an intelligent use of everyone's time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly4zd8xp74o

(from the BBC, not the daily fail)

I would now expect all the bootlickers to explain why this is a sensible policy and why I shouldn't dare criticise it.