First published Times Educational Supplement (TESPro Magazine) October 2011
I have been looking for the biggest stick.
I searched right down the punishment scale. I rejected losing points, phone calls home, detention and castigation. I looked over the imaginary cliff edge to exclusion, restraint, community service, even pain compliance techniques. I rejected them all. You see there are some punishments that sow the seeds for long term behaviour issues. Punishments that teach more than just negative consequences for negative actions. Some punishments teach children that adults are giving up. The punishment that just keeps giving (up) is isolation.
Short time outs can be highly effective way to reset expectations or find a way around a problem. Prolonged or repeated use of isolation teaches children that they are not really wanted. Forcing children to feel as if they are alone with their problems is a disproportionate punishment. It cruelly demonstrates a collective lack of empathy. We expend so much effort in telling pupils that they belong, they are one community, one team. We accommodate a huge range of diverse needs but when the symptoms are behavioural we begin the process of shunning. Am I right to feel a sense of shame that we have no more sophisticated response to poor behaviour than shutting children in cells.
We increasingly find more creative language to disguise forced imprisonment. We casually refer to it as isolation, seclusion (like a secluded beach resort!), the hole, respite, time out room, grade room and unbelievably "the Inclusion Room". I can think of nothing less inclusive than a cell. Heaping punishment on damaged children is not right. It echoes a Victorian idea that children are imperfect adults who have to ripen or rot.
Outside the main town hall in Eindhoven on a prestigious square they have built a skate park. The juxtaposition shouts a message of community that is lost on this island. It screams ‘you belong' to the young people, you are valued and important.
"Children in trouble with the law invariably describe a sense of profound exclusion from a society which they do not feel included in or recognised by."
Howard League for Penal Reform
We already starve children of positive physical contact through a collective paranoia and often repeated scare stories. Now we distance them further by locking them up in school cells with a slightly terrified adult and occasional visits from a snarling member of SLT. In a secure Training Centre the longest that you can be placed in isolation is three hours. Have we grabbed the biggest stick from the end of the punishment line and tried to crack the smallest nuts with it? If segregation is the ultimate punishment of the criminal justice system then why are we using it so casually in schools? If you use the biggest stick so early on there is nowhere else to go.
Children interpret clear messages from repeated isolation. They view it as a wholly disproportionate response, a clear sign that the adults are giving up, that they have searched ‘the tool box' (urghh) and run out of ideas. Pupils plan to meet up in the exclusion room not because they want to have fun but because they know it is a lonely place. I applaud their compassion. I would try to do the same. Expectations lowered and authority re-stamped pupils emerge from segregation with a sense of resentment not a sense of being reborn. Their resilience against authority is perversely enhanced. Isolation does not teach any new behaviours that are useful in the classroom.
I understand that some young people love the peace and calm that voluntary isolation brings. Some need temporary respite from the learning mêlée. I also understand that such rooms can be a place to hold children who need to be separated. That when Robert really kicks off there is no where else for him to go. Yet we dealt with all of these issues before exclusion rooms became so fashionable. As a creative alternative to exclusion isolation is uninspiring at best. If isolation is used to allow the child to calm down then it is overegged in more than half an hour. If it is to give respite to teachers who are struggling then the child does not need to be imprisoned.
How we treat the most damaged, the most vulnerable and the naughtiest in our society reflects our humanity. The most enlightened schools have a sign on the desk ‘the buck stops here'. We will deal with the behaviours that we are presented with. You are part of our community and we are not letting you go. We will be true to our word that every child belongs in our school community. Those schools know that it is entirely possible to punish poor behaviour effectively and at all times ensure the child that their place in this community is not at risk.