At 14, Charlene is enjoying school for the first time. Tall and confident, she was by her own admission constantly in trouble for fighting, and once found disrupting lessons more fun than work.
“I feel valued by the teachers and I never have before. And because I’m actually doing some work in lessons and concentrating, I’ve found it’s not as boring as I thought it was,” she said.
Ninestiles school in Birmingham is one of 20 or so to have introduced a new system of sanctions known as Discipline for Learning. It uses a combination of deterring the disruptive and rewarding those who want to learn.
DFL involves a sliding scale of six sanctions - known as consequences. The first of these results in a warning; a further misdemeanour in the same lesson carries a consequence two, a 10-minute detention at the first available breaktime. A subsequent violation means a consequence three, a one-hour detention after school with 24 hours’ notice.
A fourth consequence results in an hour’s detention and a letter home to parents; five carries a punishment of two to three days in isolation, and six equals exclusion.
Those children who do their work, and would normally have gone unnoticed, get a brightly-coloured stamp in their exercise book to recognise their efforts.
At a little over Pounds 3,000 for the DFL package, Garry Llewellyn, the deputy head in charge of pastoral care, believes the school has secured a bargain - prices vary according to school size.
He said: “Every pupil knows what the consequences mean, and there is no need for argument or debate between pupil and teacher, which in the past took up valuable lesson time and resulted in stress, particularly on the teacher.
“In cases where parents have had to be called in - and often they have come in very annoyed that their child has been told to stay behind after school - we have explained to them stage by stage how the child came to be in this predicament.
“The pupil is in a position where he or she cannot argue because the rules are clearly laid out. They see that the school and parents are working together and they are not going to get away with any bad behaviour.”
Ninestiles piloted the scheme last May before it came on line fully in September. A survey of pupils carried out before the summer holiday revealed that 80 per cent believed the school should implement it.
Although the full impact of DFL on Ninestiles may not be known for another five years, Mr Llewellyn has taken it a step further by developing a software package to monitor the programme. After a term it has shown a pattern emerging among ethnic groups and by gender, and learning difficulties among pupils who offend regularly.
He said: “We believe this is the first time anywhere in the country that the behaviour of pupils is being studied in this way. Some names recur time and again, so we look at which lessons are proving the stumbling block. In some cases it was clear the child concerned had a problem with literacy.”
Certain offences, such as assaulting a teacher, bullying, fighting, or smoking in the toilets, would bypass the normal DFL procedures.
Charlene, meanwhile, is looking forward to assembly where she and all those pupils who have received more than 50 stamps for good work will have their names entered into a draw for special prizes, from gift vouchers to a family box at Birmingham’s Hippodrome Theatre.
Further details: Teaching and Learning Associates, 22 Apex Court, Woodlands, Almondsbury, Bristol BS12 4JT, tel. 01454 881188.
