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 I really don't like this system ( I mean punishments) and find it degrading and outdated.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 would love to see the OP in a secondary school facing a child who is deliberately misbehaving or deal with a group of kids wandering the site disrupting lessons. Or try to get a parent in who deliberately refuses to answer the phone to the school or who never turns up for meetings. The idea that schools can find even more money than they current do for additional pastoral support is also bonkers. Schools spend significant amounts on well being and pastoral support. There isn't the money.

Schools in the UK are stricter now but that is partly because parents are more permissive which might be ok when you just have one or two children to manage but becomes chaotic if there are 30.
This is very true.

You say primary schools are different, but in primary schools firstly of course the children are younger and most want the approval of the adults in their life and haven’t yet developed stroppy teenage attitudes. It’s like saying "my eight-year-old does what I tell him so why won’t my fifteen-year-old?"

Secondly, in primary schools children are usually taught by just one or two main teachers over the course of a week, and develop a relationship with them. In secondary schools it is very different, with pupils often having a different specialist teacher for each of, say, ten subjects. The teachers may teach a couple of hundred children each week and can’t develop proper relationships with them all.

As for your opinion that it is not rude, disrespectful or disruptive for pupils to turn up late to a class, I really don’t understand that. Even if the pupil enters and takes their seat quietly (unlikely), if they have missed the first say ten minutes of the lesson where the teacher has given input and explained what he/she wants the pupils to do, what do you expect will happen? The options are that the teacher has to go through it all again just for them, or another pupil is asked to explain and has to waste their own time doing so, or the latecomer does nothing of any value. This last option means that at some point later the teacher will have to take the time to explain to them the input they missed. Why should they have to take time away from others who turned up on time?

Unpunctuality is discourteous to everyone else, at all ages. I don’t understand why you think it is acceptable. Pupils turning up to a lesson without the right equipment or books cause disruption and delay for everyone while the problem is sorted out.

A school is a microcosm of society. Society functions by the majority following the rules that society has decided are worth enforcing. Punishment for law-breaking contains an element of deterrence, to deter others from doing the same thing. I agree that some schools have rules I don’t think are worth having, e.g. specifying the exact type of shoes that may be worn, but if you don’t like the rules a school has, send your child to a different school.

All this, of course, assumes that pupils have the capacity to follow the rules. If they don’t, they may need help. Unless they have Special Needs recognised by the school, the people in the best position to either help the child themselves or talk to the school to point out the child's problems, are the parents. @Unexpecteddrivinginstructor has given you some very good practical advice.

If you encourage your child to think that they needn’t follow the rules that others follow, or even make any attempt to do so, and should not be penalised in any way for such actions, I’m afraid your child is going to have a difficult life.

I’m a primary school teacher and every school I’ve worked in does detentions.

Whats your alternative suggestion? Or do you want them to just get away with bad behaviour?

I have a kid in one of my classes who is one serious incident away from permanent exclusion. He is always late for my lessons (despite, by the way, liking and respecting me) because he is in the toilets with his mates vaping and mucking around.

He recently started turning up to my lessons on time. I asked him what on earth was going on and he said he was fed up of having a lunchtime detention for lateness every day.

When we started implementing centralised detentions for lateness, lateness to lessons went down. We have the data to show this!

The idea that we should just let kids choose when to turn up to lessons and to hang around in the corridors or toilets until they decide they can be arsed to move without consequence is just batshit. "Oh but they'll miss the start of the lesson, that's their consequence." - they don't care!

@SweatyLama It's boring to show working simple problems and the child will start to hate math for it. I am sure you would not like it.

If you show the workings, and they are correct, it shows you have understood the method, and you may get marks for this even if your final answer is incorrectly calculated. If you don't show the workings and the answer is incorrect, you will get no marks and the teacher doesn't know whether you have understood the method.

As for it being boring, well tough!

Mathematicians present solutions not answers. An answer can be plucked out of your arse. A solution convinces the person reading it that your final answer is correct.

That wouldn't work now. You'd be put in isolation during the school day if you kept missing detentions

Honestly op. I think the happy clappy school you wish for doesn't exist not does there seem to be any appetite for it amount other parents and teachers so I think m you really should look at home schooling for your child.

Haven't rtft as your OP basically tells me you've got compliant well-organised children without SEN, whom you look after well...

You know that marketing truism that 50% of the customer spending comes from 10% of the customers? (made up numbers).

Every arena of life has its frequent flyers.

And so do detentions!

Speaking as a secondary teacher, detentions are broadly for one of two things:

1. Rudeness and thoughtlessness, broadly. Rude to staff, rude to peers, breaking stuff, disruption of class/corridors/assessments/running of the school. Some students have much less control of their behaviour (and circumstances) than others.
2. Disorganisation. Late for this late for that, forgot this, forgot that, slept in, can't find PE kit/pen/brain. Now that can be unfair to dreamy, forgetful or unsupported kids (and a bunch probably have undiagnosed SEN) but staff will try to help them. Up to a point.

I have been known to describe detention as "homework club" to my sixth-formers...

OP, you do NOT want your DC in a school with a limp or unenforced sanction system. Those schools are awful to study in and awful to teach in. And I include the private sector.

Also what @nobnoblegiraffe says.

You wouldn't believe the time teaching and other staff put in every day ensuring everyone is not just in the building but in the right place in the building...

And regarding the lateness...well, what are they doing? And does it pose a fire hazard? Are they still on site?

You'd want us to know, right?

The first thing I asked my friends whose kids go to secondary school was what would happen if they didn't go to detentions. That's what I would do (I'm afraid I wasn't as brave as you when I was a kid).

I'm sorry OP. You sound very naive.

But you perhaps come from a country that has reasonable access to e.g. paediatricians, educational psychologists etc?

Sadly, in England (I don't know enough about the other nations) it's become extremely hard to access those services.

We have got increasing numbers students in school whose needs cannot be met in school but there is no alternative.

If ours don't go, the time increases. Eventually you'd find yourself in a supervised study room for a day or more.

Nearly all detentions are because learning time was missed, either the student's or other people's. What's so awful about sitting in a room catching up the missed work? What do you think the purpose of school is?

And people wonder why behaviour in some schools is so poor, and why so many teachers want to leave the profession…

They are standard but some schools.only use them for serious infringements and persistent offenders. Others (mainly certain academies) use them constantly for very minor misdemeanors.
I agree with you OP about primary schools being supportive places( there are no detentions at my GC council run school.) and then they go to very Draconian rules in secondary schools. It has become much worse since the advent of multiple academy trusts. Some seem more.like prisons than schools.

I I have such experience ;-)
"Sounds like a very different culture where the whole of society values education more than here."
I lived in a poor and crime-ridden area. About quarter of the children didn't study in school. But they didn't disturb those who wanted to study. I don't remember if they were late. But sometimes they missed classes. And they weren't punished in any way, at least at school. They sat in the school lobby ( I don't know why, maybe because there was cold outside). What difference did it make where they did't studied, in the classroom or in the lobby.
In general, I like the schools here better than mine. And I wouldn't want my children to study in my school. That's one of the reasons why my children are growing up here. But the punishment system is what I don't like about British schools.

You have said numerous times that your experience of education is very different and yet you persist in expecting the same outcome here. I work in a school that is pretty good compared with many others in our area but I still find the behaviour to be very challenging from some. If the school dropped the sanctions it would be impossible.

Fine but they are not going to change so you either put up and support your child to follow the rules, or you home school.

Its ironic that you posted a thread about how parents should support the school... by moaning about the school instead of supporting their discipline system?

I went to a small but rough secondary school in the 80's. Detentions weren't really a thing, but. If we didn't do the homework we were shouted at and shamed. I used to think it was really weird teachers were bursting a blood vessel because I'd watched TV rather than do my homework. Pupils who really played up had to do litter picking at break time, but nobody was ever kept inside at lunch or break.

The difference between them studying in the classroom or in the lobby is that in the lobby they aren’t being taught by a teacher, and in the classroom they are - which is presumably why you send them to school in the first place.

Has op suggested a workable alternative?

You have said about a quarter of children in your school did not study and often sat in the lobby not in the classroom.

In the U.K. this is considered unacceptable and all children have a right to an education.

The UK goes to a lot of effort to make sure that all children can learn and have opportunities to access education.

If the schooling system in your country allows a quarter to drop out because they don't want to study it doesn't sound like a good school system.