Thank you for your response - I enjoy talking about education and I find your commentary to be very insightful.

As to the issue of why authority is perceived by students in the running rather than the supervision of detentions, I have some (unresearched and unsupported) opinions.

Once again, I will qualify my statements with the proviso that I work in a “good” school, and thus my perceptions may not be relevant to a “hell high”. I think that personally supervising detentions adds an aspect of personal value to the sanction; the teacher cares enough about the incident to spend their own time enforcing the sanction. This subtext of the detention adds some emphasis. I fully recognise that in some cases, the student is as thick as an entire lumber yard, and such effort is futile/ ineffective, however it does make a distinction between the type of teacher who will issue detentions without consideration (and thus without a “rehabilitation” aspect), and the type of teacher who actually wants the student to learn from the sanction.

My experience has been somewhat shaped by prior schools in which I taught, where teachers were not allowed to apply any discipline other than issuing a “demerit”, which would accumulate until a predefined level was reached, at which time the Year Coordinator would apply the appropriate punishment. This was an utter disaster, as the punishment was totally detached from the event, and was frequently perceived by students almost random. Furhtermore, as you can imagine, it depended solely on the discretion of the coordinator as to the seriousness with which it was treated.

I noticed that you did not respond to my about suspensions - do you experience similar ineffectiveness of this type of sanction at your end of the world?

Finally, coordinators in Australia frequently receive a payment totally about 4% of the annual salary (and fewer lessons to teach to provide time to do all the administration (attendance tracking, cross-subject student academic performance monitoring, etc) and higher level disciplinary procedures. In state schools in Australia, you definitely do not do coordinating for the money. I would make more money by tutoring a single student for a single hour at the going rate than I do by being a coordinator. As to the workload, I frequently arrive at school at least an hour before pure-teaching staff, and usually leave an hour after them, and rarely have time to do out-of-class work during school hours. Most Australian Coordinators “burn-out” after 5-8 years, take a year or two break, and return to the position. Definitely not a cushy position, particularly as you are frequently dealing with problems that have been deemed to difficult by a teacher (who may be right, but it certainly ups the challenge level of the job!).

AusAndrew.

My sweeping generalisation about good schools was based on my experience of meeting several ex-grammar school students who all seem to have experienced some form of centralised detention system many years ago, some are shocked to discover that their experience wasn’t universal.

By the way, one of my friends at one of my previous schools had been a Year Co-ordinator in Australia. He was somewhat shocked to discover that in this country:

a) Year heads are paid a huge amount
b) Some (and I definitely do mean only some) of them apparently do nothing for the money

I want to thank you for the work you put into this blog; I find it to be a constantly interesting source of thought on educational issues - and stress relieving humour. I have been reading your blog for the last year, and read almost all of your archive of posts.

I am a Teacher in Australia, and a Year Level Coordinator (similar, I beleive, to UK schools’ HOY role, but divided across multiple teachers in a school of ~1800, we have 18 YLCs, 3 per year level, years 7-12). As a YLC, I am also an active teaching teacher, not only an administrator, and I teach in a “state school” which is what we call the government-run public schools.

The school I teach in is in an upper-middle class and, as such, we have far less problems with discipline than you have described. This means that we have a different outlook on discipline - and a different experience with the school body. The vast majority of the behaviour that you describe would be immediate expulsion (exclusion) cases, and most would be referred to the Police. This environment has resulted in a very different discipline hierarchy than the one you describe - or that ninestiles employs.

Discipline is primarily delivered by Teachers to their own classes/ students, and escalates from
1) Warning
2) Parental notification
3) “internal” (teacher administered) Detention
4) After-school (YLC administered) detention

5) External suspension (temporary time away from school)
6) Internal suspension (isolation from class, usually the students “follows” a YLC for a day, sitting in the back of their classes)
7) and eventually, expulsion (withdrawal of permission to attend the school), but only after at least 10 days of suspension in one year.

The reason I’ve described our method is to challenge one of your assumptions about teacher-run detentions. While I agree with the farcical context of “relationship-building” within a discipline consequence, I do disagree with your contention about “Good schools have known for decades that detentions should be centrally organised”. One of the reasons (in the environment that I teach) that we use teacher issued detentions is to keep the power in the teachers’ hands. If teachers do not run their own detentions, it seems that they are perceived as having no authority to do so. As you can see, we do have a informal form of centrally organised detentions for serious or repeat offenders, but it I feel that it helps for a teacher’s own authority with their classes to be able to issue and control their own detentions.

My problem with the discipline system is higher up the chain, at the “suspension” level. A suspension is a set number of days that a student is not to attend school. The idea of this is to give the student time to reflect on their behaviour and express the school’s displeasure at their behaviour both to them and to their family. The problem with this is frequently (but not always), students who are in enough trouble to warrant suspension are frequently not happy in the educational environment, and thus do not experience either censure or reflection during a suspension, but merely have a holiday from school. This does not seem to send the message that the school (should) want to send.

Anyway, enough rambling. I look forward to further posts from you.

I might add that plenty of schools have gone the vocational route without getting anywhere near the results Ninestiles did.

It worked because the critical mass of tossers was not an unworkable proportion; because the HT had leverage in that the only alternative school was a hellhole and parents did actually care.

We have exactly the same system at Hell High. It is perfectly possible, using the system as it is set out, to send three quarters of your class to the sin bin in any one lesson; indeed our NQT in his innocence thought the sanctions sytem was there to be followed and then found himself criticised for sending so many pupils out.

This is clearly not practical. In effect, certain pupils rack up so many detentions that there aren’t enough days in the half-term to fit them in, so at the end of the half-term they are wiped. This is patently unfair to the occasional sinner who does turn up for detention, and is merely confirmation of the constant bastards’ belief that they are powerful and untouchable.

There is nowhere else to go. We are already the dumping ground for the city’s excluded pupils. The parents invariably back up their children. We lose money if by some miracle an exclusion is upheld - and sexual assault, physical assault by pupils on teachers and a false allegation of physical assault have all failed to produce a permanent exclusion.

Detention? Give me ten. I ain’t going.