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

I'm a teacher. That's insane.

Thanks for the clarity. I think I also misread!

My son also started y 7. Some kids got detention but for misbehaving during class- disruption.
For things you are describing they would get "-" negative points

This kind of over the top policy. It sets up two things - resentment from kids who feel they have been punished unfairly, and a lack of impact because detentions are so common.

Well they managed to figure out it was this child enough to give her detention so 🤷‍♀️

All cases sound absolutely bonkers, would really make me second guess sending my child there.

@Cocostardust Can you say what school it is and share a link to their policy?

There is an explosion of needlessly draconian schools. I am all for discipline and homework and detention for misbehaviour, but there is discipline, and there is petty capricious silly rules by repressed headteachers who didn't get enough love from mummy and now get off exercising their authority on a bunch of kids.

There was the case of an Academy punishing a girl for wearing the cheaper, 99% identical Asda version of the uniform skirt https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-66812748

Or the case of the school where teachers wearing coats confiscate the coats of children because they are not supposed to wear them in the school, not even in the courtyard https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/school-bans-freezing-pupils-wearing-6485510

Or that school in London where another nutjob headteacher bans bicycles https://road.cc/content/news/s-london-school-bans-knives-guns-drugs-and-bicycles-286243 Is that even legal???

What a horrible school.

How do you think that the marks are recorded?

Its not that hard to figure out.

It's bonkers. Some schools are way too heavy handed with this sort of stuff.

I might just about be able to get on board with the detention for the kid who didn't write her name on her homework. I think it's nuts, but arguably it was a careless mistake that she won't make again.

Your dd, however, attempted the homework and appears to have tried hard with it. She should not be punished for misunderstanding it. I'm all in favour of backing up the school with regard to discipline, but in this scenario, I would actually query it with the school because this is how children get disillusioned and demotivated. I would be inclined to email the school and explain that you're not happy with the sanction for a piece of homework that your child spent ages doing and did her best on.

I still haven't forgotten working incredibly hard on my first piece of art homework at secondary school. I wasn't artistically talented but I had spent hours doing it and I had absolutely given it my best shot. The teacher screwed it up and put it in the bin in front of me because it wasn't good enough. I was so heartbroken, it still upsets me to think about it more than 40 years later.

It depends if they do wrong.

I know someone who got at least one a week but my dd never had one all the time she was as school. Same school, same year.

There’s a school near us like that, they say that they crack down hard in the first term to build students into what they want them to be. It’s awful, every year there are tales of year 7s being beaten into submission. But parents want their boys to
go there because they get good results. Its baffling. DS school is a much kinder place.

Also academies, free schools etc are virtually unaccountable to anyone. Unless you take them to court, a long, expensive and uncertain process which not everyone can afford, I don't think much can be done to get them to change.

My DS in year 8 has never had a detention. He got a behaviour point for forgetting to do homework once (I think 3 of those get a detention but eh produced it the next day so not sure if he'd have got more if not), and said a friend got a behaviour point for clearly rushing his homework and not doing it properly. Forgetting stuff again only gets a behaviour point unless it's frequent or they forget their student ID. Other than that detentions seem to only be for actual misbehaviour, although it's a grammar school so probably has less of that than some schools.

@ParentOfOne yes sure, it’s Bottisham Village College. Their behaviour policy isn’t matching their reasons for giving detentions at all, and the fact they are being given out for such petty reasons doesn’t add up either, it’s creating a really negative and stressed environment for the kids already and I really don’t think the school realises how much this is impacting the children mentally. I’m hoping things pick up over the next couple of months, if they don’t and we still feel she’s struggling and the school isn’t taking care of the kids I’ll look into moving her. She feels like she can’t put a foot wrong and everything has to be perfect or she is going to be punished and that’ll wear her down incredibly. I just don’t understand why none of the teachers are taking even a moment to understand what’s happened before throwing out detentions, there’s absolutely zero communication. I do wonder if the teachers have been told to crack down because of the Ofsted report, but unfortunately all this approach is going to create is unhappy, nervous children and upset parents. The opposite of what they want to achieve. Fingers crossed things change soon. Thanks for all of your input it’s been really helpful.

Why did the children with names on get detention?

Yeah MrsH, you monster. Wouldn't it have been better to give detention to the 7 kids who you didn't know whether they had handed in their homework or not because there was no named homework belonging to them?

They didn't. The 7 who appear not to have done their work got detention.

If you can't be arsed writing your name on your work when I've asked you to several times, you can come back at break.

Behaviour points for an academic error? That's awful if I have understood that correctly.

I was a secondary school teacher for 10 years and I probably averaged a couple of detentions a term, nearly all for behaviour. Not sure I ever gave a Year 7 a detention and definitely not in the first term.

Now, I do think that detentions are necessary, but they should be rare, not everyday. And they should be given out to people who haven’t made the effort.

Now, for homework, we might have had compulsory ‘clinic’ at lunchtime, and you could call that detention. But names and reasons matter, they were given compulsory clinic to help them keep up or achieve their potential and were encouraged to view this as help rather than punishment.

I feel sorry for your daughter and think that sounds like shitty teaching.

Your DD's school sounds horrible

DD is in year 9 and has never had a detention

And, as for names, not writing your name is a pain in the arse, but I just gave the anonymous ones out at the end and found out the names so I could add them to my mark book/spreadsheet.

Higher up the school I sometimes refused to mark anonymous work and they would just get it back unmarked to learn their lesson, but early in Year 7 they need a lot of scaffolding and help.

The teachers probably make errors in their own emails or lesson resources occasionally! Detention for an error is horrible. I'd complain to the Head, vociferously.

That's great support. Years 7's find it such a big leap.

I have done that in year 7 (full class present) and still ended up with work with no name on it.