Isolation booths

Behaviour battleground: isolation booths divide opinion among teachers

Richard Adams

By: Richard Adams.

From a ‘lose the booths’ conference to ‘warm-strict’ policies, teachers are divided on how to tackle unruly pupils

The use of isolation booths in state schools has become one of the most contentious issues among teachers in England, even if public concern over pupil behaviour has faded from the headlines since the 1990s.

Social media has become an almost nightly battleground between teachers with conflicting views on behaviour management and the use of internal exclusion or removal rooms within schools, where disruptive pupils are taken out of class and sent to study elsewhere under supervision.

What the debate reveals is that the more than 20,000 state schools in England have wide variations in discipline and behaviour policies.

In some cases pupils are sat at booths, similar to cubicles used in call centres, with a desk and three high sides. It is the use of this furniture that has become controversial within the profession, to the extent that a “lose the booths” conference for teachers is being held this weekend in Leeds.

“Learn how to remove the booths from your school and still have great outcomes,” says the publicity for Lose The Booths Live!, which promises a conference with “children’s rights at heart”.

But in practice the use of “consequence rooms” or removal spaces, is just one potential tool in a school’s armoury. While some regularly use internal exclusion as a formal policy for misbehaviour, others reject it – highlighting the autonomy enjoyed by headteachers.

At one end of the scale are schools practising “warm-strict” behaviour management, which their critics deride as “zero tolerance”, with clear rules and sanctions. Those rules can be at a level of detail some parents may find disturbing: not only the lengths of skirts or type of shoes but also maintaining complete silence when moving between classes, and sanctions for what some regard as petty issues such as failure to bring a pen to class, or not keeping eye contact with the teacher during lessons.

But the defenders of this approach, including schools such as the Magna Academy in Dorset or King Solomon Academy in Paddington, say that a well-structured behaviour policy is liberating for teachers. By cutting out the background buzz of what the former Ofsted chief inspector Michael Wilshaw called “low-level, persistent disruptive behaviour”, the whole class can then concentrate on learning.

One maths teacher who moved to a recently opened “warm-strict” free school said he was astonished by the difference a successful behaviour policy can make.

“I’d worked at four schools before, but this is the first time I’ve been actually able to teach for the whole lesson. At the other schools pupils would arrive making noise and jostling, and take five or 10 minutes just to settle down. Here there’s none of that,” he said.

But on social media teachers regularly spar over the need for such detailed rules and sanctions for what in other, more relaxed schools would be minor infringements.

There’s little in the way of research to say which approach is more effective in terms of pupil behaviour or academic attainment – although supporters point to the strong GCSE results produced by the Michaela Free School in Brent, one of the flagships of the stricter approach.

While it is impossible to say if pupil behaviour has improved in recent years, statistics show that the rates of expulsions from state schools are well below their peaks of the 1990s. In the 1993-94 school year, more than 12,000 pupils were permanently excluded. By 2017-18, the latest year for which we have figures, just 7,900 were permanently excluded, although the proportion of pupils being excluded has been rising slowly over the previous five years.

But many teachers remain unconvinced by the stricter approach. The most recent annual conference of the National Education Union held a hostile debate over zero tolerance policies, with one delegate labelling the use of booths as “inhuman”, while others blamed budget cuts for the loss of school support staff.

But union surveys have also found that many teachers feel unsupported by their school’s management over tackling bad behaviour, with behaviour frequently cited as a key reason for leaving the profession.

The Conservatives went into the most recent general election vowing to improve school behaviour, seeing it as a vote winner. Its policies included giving school inspectors extra time to examine bullying and behaviour, while documents obtained by the Guardian before the election showed the government preparing to “back heads to use powers to promote good behaviour including sanctions and rewards” including the use of “reasonable force”.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jan/17/behaviour-battleground-isolation-booths-divide-opinion-among-teachers

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Use of isolation booths in schools criticised as ‘barbaric’ punishment

Frances Perraudin

By Frances Perraudin

Parents attack ‘consequence rooms’ where pupils are made to sit alone in silence for hours

Parents have criticised the use of isolation booths at secondary schools across the country, after concerns were raised about the “zero-tolerance” behaviour policies run by some academy trusts.

Guardian analysis found this week that 45 schools in England excluded at least 20% of their pupils in the last academic year. The Outwood Grange Academies Trust – which runs 30 schools across Yorkshire, the Humber and the east Midlands – ran nine out of the 45.

Outwood Academy Ormesby in Middlesbrough topped the list, with 41% of its pupils receiving at least one suspension in the last academic year.

Parents with children at schools in the trust raised concerns that, as well as the high levels of exclusions, many schools were also using “consequences rooms” – small booths in which a child sits alone and in silence for hours on end as punishment for breaking school rules.

The booths have been described as “internal exclusions” and parents called on academy trusts to release information on the number of hours of education children were missing while in the booths.

According to Outwood Grange Academies Trust’s behaviour policy, “the rule when in detention and in the consequences room is occupy and ignore”.

“Students cannot sleep or put their heads on the desk. They must sit up and face forward,” it adds.

When in the booths, children are not allowed to “tap, chew, swing on their chairs, shout out, sigh, or any other unacceptable or disruptive behaviour”.

“You will be allowed to go to the toilet up to a maximum of three times during the day (maximum five minutes per visit),” the policy reads. “You must use the closest toilet and go directly there and back. You will be escorted to get your lunch, but you must stay silent.”

Pupils may complete work they have brought themselves but they do not have to.

One mother, whose son goes to an Outwood Grange school in Wakefield, said her son had lost days of his education sitting in a consequence room. “It’s a small booth. They can’t look left or right, they can’t look behind. They have to focus in front all the time. They can’t speak to anyone for the whole day. It’s basically an internal exclusion. It’s barbaric,” she said.

Another mother, whose son goes to a school in Yorkshire run by the DeltaAcademies Trust, said he was “just a regular kid” and there had never been serious concerns raised about his behaviour before the school’s new discipline policy was introduced.

“Then he got 22 hours in an isolation booth in one week and he was just an absolute mess,” she said. “He came out at the end of the day and he didn’t look well. His legs were shaking and he could hardly string a sentence together. He looked completely done in.

“My concern is they’re not using other methods that actually keep the children in the classroom. Eight hours is far too long to keep a child in isolation. I don’t think they want to put the resources into other ways of dealing with behaviour. They are multi-academy trusts and I think they want to try and keep costs down.”

In March, delegates at the National Education Union conference in Brighton voted unanimously to oppose “the move towards ever more punitive behaviour policies in schools”, saying it was feeding a mental health crisis for children.

The motion read: “The increasing use of detention, isolation and exclusion, often talked of as being ‘zero -tolerance’ approaches, usually mean ignoring the varied difficulties children have, in favour of punishment. We believe that, above all else, children need support, respect and love.”

A spokesperson for the Outwood Grange Academies Trust said: “The use of isolation booths and rooms allow students to calm down, reflect and often self-correct their behaviour that may have led to that situation.

“The trust employs all reasonable adjustments for students with special needs within their behaviour policy and invest in the pastoral and welfare support of all our students.”

The trust added: “Ofsted have inspected our academies using this behaviour policy for the past 15 years and in every case found the academy to have transformed the education that students receive, with five being rated ‘outstanding’.”

Like Outwood Grange, the Delta Academies Trust, which runs 46 schools across the country, said pupils were given a number of warnings before being put in isolation and that wraparound support was provided for them.

“It is not unusual in secondary schools for students to have periods of time in isolation as a result of persistent defiance and disruptive behaviour,” said a spokesperson.

“This is the case in both local authority schools and academies and is an effective measure to reduce low-level disruption and truculent behaviour, which is widely reported as having a deleterious effect on the quality of education in our country. Obviously students who are in isolation will complain they don’t like it; that is because it is a punishment for disrupting other children’s education.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “It is up to schools to decide what forms of discipline they adopt, as long as they are lawful and used reasonably. If a school chooses to use isolation rooms, pupils’ time in isolation should be no longer than necessary and used as constructively as possible.”

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/sep/02/barbaric-school-punishment-of-consequence-rooms-criticised-by-parents

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