Detentions as a punishment

[SweatyLama]

I didn't grow up in the UK, but my children were born here. This year, my DS started secondary school for the first time, and I discovered that they have a system of punishments in place. Is this a common practice in all state schools in Britain? I really don't like this system ( I mean punishments) and find it degrading and outdated.

I didn’t quite understand. Your children weren’t afraid to push boundaries, but they chose not to. Is that correct? Why do you think they weren’t afraid? And why did they agree to go to their room?

Oh, they pushed boundaries and I told them very clearly not to it again. My eldest repeatedly pushed boundaries, I think he needed constant reassurance that they were there for him to feel safe.
My DC knew if they didn't come home by a certain time I'd be worried they wouldn't be allowed to go out the next time, or asked to come home earlier. They never pushed it with that one though. When they were little if they took all of the biscuits and ate them in one sitting I wouldn't buy more for quite a while. I guess some one see that as a punishment, but I wasn't doing it as a punishment, more that I don't want them scoffing biscuits. They'd agree to go to their room because they trusted me to kept them safe, and they probably knew their own behaviour wasn't great. There was one occasion when DS refused to go to his room so I picked up a huge 13yo and carried him there. I told him that when I tell him to go to his room, he goes to his room. I'm not sure which one of us was most shocked.
But my DC respect and trust me, which isn't going to be the case for every pupil teacher relationship in a school.

I suppose being told off is a punishment, - mum being grumpy because you've been a dick is a natural consequence. But pupils don't care about the feelings of a teacher.

Two of my DC are diagnosed ND and I was able to work around that at home. It's not always possible for that in schools . I think some schools do a great job (and some really don't) but there just aren't the resources in state schools.

Sorry if that's jumbled, I'm typing on the run!

It is mostly the result of ideological decisions that have prioritised other aspects of the state. And curriculum decisions that never aimed to provide education matched to.the needs of all learners (just look at the low funding for vocational options - that was fine when we could import workers from lower wage EU countries of course).

And as our economy is relatively good at job creation, people in professional jobs (like teaching, educational psychology etc) where real wages have fallen and/or conditions have worsened have changed job or taken early retirement.

Surely the ideological aspect can't be too unfamiliar to a Russian?!

Additionally, we have an over developed financial sector and it has been very expensive to pay for the financial crisis. It was only 16 uears ago. That's nothing considering the billions of debt it added.

The economic inactivity is at least in part because the NHS was already in a poor state when Covid hit it.

Google "austerity, UK" and you will find relevant commentary.

But i found
Percentage of 16–24-year-olds NEETs ( not in education, employment or training)
11.6%
What I was actually trying to find was what percentage of kids just come to school to pretend to study, preventing motivated kids from learning.
I think these 11,6% are these teenagers.

yes, i understand, but for someone who hasn't been placed in detention, it still seems weird

I agree the best we can do for this 25 percent is give them an education even if its by a few detentions and pep talks.

You are equating the absence of punishment with the absence of rules. This is not true. Rules are not maintained only by fear of punishment. I know how unusual this sounds. But it is possible.

I think the figures would be higher. Some kids continue to sixth form and still bum around, but they’re not NEET. Similarly, some will get jobs or apprenticeships and do okay, despite having messed around throughout school. I think GCSE results are a fairly broad representation of whether the children in that particular school are engaged or not (allowing for SEN).

My DS works in a school where discipline is very lax. He tells me that large number of the children spend their lessons vaping in the toilets and teachers would prefer that than having them in their lessons causing disruption. Less than 25% of children pass their maths and English GCSE.

And some kids will try their hardest but struggle. They get through college on a level 1 or 2 course and still end up NEET age 18-24.

))))) You would be more shocked by what was happening in the country during those years. Unpunished crime, gangs of teenagers fighting to the death among themselves, police covering up crime, and much more.

So how was this behaviour treated in your home country when you were at school.

Here in the UK detentions are just a normal part of the school punishment, but you haven't mention what do they do for good behaviour.

For example my DC school have the normal 10 mins up to an hour detentions. The up to report cards which are marked in lesson by teachers and then Intervention and taught out of class. But along side this are house points Which are given for good behaviour in each lesson, assemble Etc. And which if the child reaches the set number house points, attendance receive a reward at the end of term these range from a cinema trip (Autumn term) for Bronze, Ice skating (Spring term) for Silver and a theme park (summer term) for Gold.

You can't have one without the other.

Great. Maybe train as a teacher and go and show them how to do it then, OP. Good luck.

Poor kids.

Written off and abandoned/kicked out and deprived of the opportunity to learn because the OP can't be arsed with them if they don't behave acceptably.

Far better to receive the inconvenience of a detention from time to time and learn it's easier to just do the work/turn up on time/not call the teacher a prick than to be told 'Oh well, your consequences are that you're barely literate, have no qualifications and will likely never have a decent future. Not our problem'.

I'd deliberately get lunchtime detentions for not handing in homework when I didn't have clubs to go to - because it meant after getting my food, I'd be able to sit in a quiet, warm and dry classroom and get on with other work (as I'd done the work I hadn't handed in already) rather than have to stand for 40 minutes in the rain and cold for four months of the year. Were it not for that terrible deprivation of liberty, I'd have been free to get soaked and freeze my arse off miserably. I know which felt more like punishment to me.

Children are kept back a year not as a punishment, but because a person who has not understood some of the information cannot study further. For example, if a child has not learned to add in your school, he continues studying, although everyone understands that without addition he is not able to understand multiplication.
I agree with your opinion about regularly testing, I think it destroyed pupils.
they have to come back later to see the teacher who will go over the work they’ve missed
I would agree with you if it would be true.
Because in reality, children are kept in detention to sit and reflect on their lateness, not to meet with the teacher. The same applies to detentions for forgetting their PE kit or homework. It wouldn’t even feel like a punishment if children who forgot their kit attended an extra PE session to make up for the one they missed. Or if they stayed after school to complete the homework they hadn’t done at home.
or is this really how things are?

this is what i am writing about. you can't force a horse to drink. and the fact that children are forced to go to class distracts both teachers and motivated children. and punishments didn't help. this doesn't mean that we just need to forget about them. but we need to work with these children separately.

Really? Why do you think so?

Often because some kids have a level of SEN which may or may not be recognised and supported. Support can disappear once out of education.

Hospitality (for example) may prefer to employ a couple of uni students part time rather than someone with a hospitality qualification from college but who also has ASD and who struggles to get through the interview stage.

Every family have own method ))) and most of them is not humane.

Rewards also have a negative effect on a person, just like punishments.
Alfie Kohn (Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason) writes about this very convincingly.

I got. Thank you.

I don't want to justify a system that I don't like, but to be fair, those kids had the same knowledge at the end of school as your kids who don't want to study but are kept in school by force.

)))) Sorry for my English, but I somehow explained the situation incorrectly, because what you described does not correspond to reality and what I meant. I apologize again for misleading you.

You've used the phrase 'You can't force a horse to drink' and said that they need to be separated from those children who are already able to comply with every instruction.

That's absolutely giving up on children. If you want a horse to drink, you can stay there longer and they drink, giving them extra time means that you might see there's a bloody great carp in the water that's putting them off, the slope to the water's edge is too slippery or steep or (more likely with horses) that there's a leaf on a tree in the distance that looks different in some way and the wind's blowing in a slightly different direction, meaning they can't relax enough to be able to drink.

Saying 'Oh, well, can't make you, time to go' means the horse goes thirsty and won't want to drink there next time, either - when you could have stayed there a bit longer and identified/solved the problem before they developed a complete aversion to everything from lakes and rivers to watertroughs and buckets.

If a child has a detention or number of detentions, there's not just the opportunity for them to learn it's not worth the hassle, they can learn the actual work, they're out of a potentially tense situation or dynamic which led to them kicking off in class and the data gathered from behaviour records can be used to identify possible causes and trends - whether it's around a particular teacher (might be that they shout a lot, might be that they have unreasonable expectations) or the student's environment (such as not having access to the internet or a safe space for work at home, being bullied) or something else, such as undiagnosed SEND.

I'm loving where you went with the analogy, @NeverDropYourMooncup!

Perhaps we'd better not start on flogging a dead horse 😂?

I like your example with the horse, and I completely agree with it. But what is detention in the case of the horse? It’s like a dipping the horse's head into the water. It's unlikely that after that it would want to go near the water again. And what I suggested, as you wrote, is to find the right approach, but without distracting the teacher whose horses are drinking in unison, occasionally getting distracted by flies. And for being distracted by flies, I also suggest not to dip the horse in water.
Sometimes a horse might drink earlier or later than the others, or get distracted. When I mentioned special schools, I was referring to cases where the student’s presence is dangerous for teachers or other students. In other cases, there should be someone in the school who finds out the reasons and seeks an approach.

I don't want to be flippant OP as youth unemployment isn't good, but the UK's youth unemployment rate is only slightly above the OECD average. BREXIT no doubt contributed.

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