School punishment systems should be put under the microscope

In his latest blog, education journalist Warwick Mansell looks at how the strict and draconian policies that some schools have in place for managing pupil behaviour are being questioned by worried parents, and asks why the government is not doing more to address concerns.

“We are having to put my year nine daughter through external counselling for her anxiety and depression brought on, I feel, by the [school’s] draconian punishment system… She has such an unhealthy fear of getting things wrong and making a mistake that she bursts into tears in her lessons.”

So said a parent, quoted anonymously, in a survey by a campaign group at a secondary school in Cambridgeshire earlier this year, as families sought answers from the academy trust running it about the impact of what were being seen as strict policies for managing pupil behaviour there.

The campaign group at this school – St Ivo in St Ives – says it has 500 parents in its membership, mostly concerned about the way the school is being managed by the academy trust, called Astrea, which runs it. This week members of a teachers’ union also voiced concerns, as they began five days of strikes.

The Department for Education, which notionally oversees the school because it is a government-funded academy, has little by way of response to parents’ worries. Its regional director took six months to get back to a letter from the campaign group raising concerns, only to tell them effectively that there was little it could do, as academies set their own policies.

Yet parent campaigns about the way some schools, often in the control of academy trusts, have managed pupil behaviour have become a recurring theme in recent years, popping up around the country.

For example, in April a “Reset Ted Wragg Trust” campaign was launched in Devon, over what the local paper reported at the time as parental concerns over “failing” and “unrealistic” behaviour policies which were undermining pupils’ wellbeing. The title was a play on the word “reset,” which is used by this trust and others to describe taking pupils out of lessons for up to a whole day if they fail to follow rules.

In September, parents and pupils at Camborne Science and International Academy in Cornwall staged protests over what they said were “harsh” rules, sometimes described as “prison-like”.

There has also been fierce social media criticism of a “supervision room” at a school in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, after a photo circulated of a room with a row of 20 cubicles, in which pupils must spend up to the whole day if they misbehave.

Some of the criticism may well have crossed a line, with a student complaining, for example, that the pupil protest in Camborne had been “scary,” while police were reportedly in attendance for that and the accompanying parent demonstration.

However, often in my experience parents can be voicing what seem reasonable concerns, such as in this video, about children being taken out of lessons for long periods of time, and the use of sanctions for relatively minor misdemeanours, such as uniform infringements or forgetting pens, or rules around access to toilets. If such rules are making their children anxious, it is understandable that they want that concern listened to by those in charge.

New government, new approach?

An interesting question, now, is what approach an incoming Labour government might take to all of this.

Schools will argue that they need the freedom to set up systems which will work in terms of keeping schools calm and orderly. But critics say that the government’s approach has been unbalanced, failing fully to take into account the impact of such policies on all pupils.

The government’s main policy on the issue, which it calls “behaviour hubs”, sees up to 700 schools funded to work together on improving behaviour.

But information on this scheme has been very difficult to come by: the government refused to release the names of all schools participating, and it has now put off the publication of an interim report on the policy. It will be 2025, more than six years after the scheme was first announced, and after a general election which currently seems likely to spell the demise of the government which launched the policy, before a final evaluation is published. And yet, the effects on young people – those repeatedly sanctioned, and those not – surely deserve detailed, public and timely scrutiny, in the interest of all pupils.

The Behaviour Hubs scheme, and its advisory group, is headed by Tom Bennett, a former teacher and author who tends to defend schools under scrutiny over strict sanctions regimes and has been known to rail at non-conservative “progressive” approaches to education. But it lacks, for example, the presence of any educational psychologists.

The British Psychological Society was represented, however, on the steering committee of a group called the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, which published a report over the summer which concluded that “punitive” school behaviour policies could “harm pupil mental health”.

One person who offered evidence for this report, who works for the legal organisation Just for Kids Law, told it that the practice of removing children from lessons was having a “quite huge” impact “on the young people we support… Children being in isolation rooms for… Weeks and months for things sometimes that are nothing to do with their behaviour, like their haircut.”

That report seems to have had little impact on this government, however, which has made Mr Bennett, as the lead adviser, or “tsar,” it appointed on behaviour back in 2015, arguably the public face of these policies.

Yet, with concerns about young people’s mental health on the rise especially after covid, and amid claims that behaviour is not improving despite this seemingly being ministers’ favoured approach, there may be a case for a “reset”.

At the least, a detailed, open-minded and widely-sourced investigation by government itself into the effects of these policies in the round, on all children, would seem long overdue. If this government seems unlikely to preside over such a probe, an incoming Labour administration really should.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist, who founded and writes for the investigative website, Education Uncovered.

The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author as an independent contributor. They are not endorsed or necessarily shared by Prospect.