By Eric King
Amanda Spielmon’s writing lines and detentions as a mechanism of school policies to tackle behavioural problems in UK schools. Spielman was speaking at the Wellington Festival for education last Thursday where she gave her usual detailed speech about education. She highlighted behaviour as one of the chief issues parents raise with her, before proceeding to highlight writing lines, community services, and school detentions as some of the strong policies that addresses poor behaviour in schools.
” I fundamentally disagree with those who say that taking a tough stance on behaviour is unfair to children. Quite the opposite, there is nothing kind about letting a few pupils spoil school for everyone else. That is why we expect heads to put in place strong policies that support their staff in tackling poor behaviour. And I think it’s entirely appropriate to use sanctions, such as writing lines, ‘community service’ in the school grounds, such as picking up litter, and school detentions. And where they are part of a school’s behaviour policy, they’ll have our full support”.
”And when I talk about behaviour, I’m not just talking about serious disruption or bullying, important as these are. I want us to look just as hard at low-level disruption, which stops pupils learning and which can make the job of classroom management miserable”.
ATTENTION
Spielman went on to say she would like to see bad behaviour get the attention it needs in Ofsted’s inspections. So would we. Poor behaviour is one of the shameful elements of our schools.
The truth is that whilst these mechanisms may work in some schools, they are not used in many schools.Detentions are a common form of punitive measures in many secondary schools, but just a handful of schools use writing lines or community service as a means of punishment. The reality is that pupils in many schools will simply not write any lines even if presented to them as punishment. And there are schools were pupils refuse to comply with measures like detention. If detention were an answer to the serious problems of bad behaviour, pupils in every school in England would be well behaved.
It is very presumptive to conclude that detention works, or is that it is even implemented in a vast majority of our schools in the UK. Spielman is an efficient leader of Ofsted, but there can be no pretense that schools in England generally have a grip on behavioural problems, because they simply don’t.
Poor behaviour is a major factor that undermines the education of many schools because quite frankly, badly behaved students get away with it far too often. Community service is in fact unheard of in a vast majority of Uk secondary schools, and certainly cannot be recommended for use in primary schools. Spielman expressed her backing of head teachers who ban mobile phones in schools, as though this addresses the bulk of behavioural problems in schools.
Banning mobile phones in schools is a necessary discipline to prevent unwanted distractions. The absence of mobile phones from schools are still not a complete solution to the problem of behaviour in schools. it should be considered an embarrassment that some schools still permit mobile phones considering the undeniable role its possession can play in side-tracking pupils from a high level of focus. However, a lot more discipline is lacking in too many primary and secondary schools, rules to keep mobile phones away from schools is not enough. it is the job of the government to work out a solution. Besides disruption to other pupils, many pupils are extremely rude and violent to teachers, leaving them helpless as to how to discipline them. Pupils sent to detentions Teachers need to be given more powers and guidelines to discipline unruly pupils in a way that sends the message home that bad behaviour will not be tolerated in our schools.More radical steps are necessary to eliminate the serious problem of bad behaviour in our schools.