School discipline - Daily Mail readers look away now

Duty teacher detention time

Every Thursday I supervise a detention after school for an hour. When a student has been poorly behaved or disruptive we operate a ‘buddy’ system where the student is sent to a colleague and can settle down. This is a system that involves no consequence to the student as the teacher can then teach and make sure students are learning. If they disrupt the class they’ve been sent to we have a duty teacher, usually a senior member of staff, who will supervise the duty room. Students sent there are put in detention after school each Thursday.

Very oddly, given the lack of consequence, many of them refuse to go to the buddy, preferring to go to the duty room and face the detention. They say it is embarrassing going into someone else’s class, especially when it is another year group. It is also fair to say that for many of them the process of cooling down takes time and they end up storming off and refusing to do as told.

As a result here I am supervising this week’s miscreants. There are 15 of them and, like the inclusion room, only one is a girl.

Before supervising the detention I supervise the inclusion room and I wonder how many you would guess if I asked you the number of students who simply moved from the inclusion room into the duty teacher detention. The answer is 6. So you can see that the same names keep cropping up repeatedly although there are more who visit now and again and seem to respond far more quickly to the sanctions in place.

All of which begs the question whether these sanctions actually work for a hard core of students. What purpose is served by persevering with the buddy, the duty room and inclusion for these students?

In the first instance of course it does make a difference to the class they are removed from. They can get on and learn in a more settled and conducive atmosphere. It also allows someone like me to get to know these young people and establish some relationship with them. The detentions and so on can help in the provision of support and mentors. In the vast majority of cases you actually see that problems become less frequent and you can identify where they are occurring and provide more support for the teacher/student. Unfortunately they also provide evidence that a range of strategies has been pursued, a necessity when taking other action against students such as use of Pupil Referral Units.