Karl J. Babarczi

New report via BBC (I'll link in comments) has lots of parents saying their child was 'sent to isolation for 'dropping a pen' or 'dropping a book'. Hmmm, like the old 'he was sent to isolation for asking a question'. You know, there is almost always more to it than that - the child is being intentionally disruptive, has already been warned, has been rude to the teacher or is having a laugh with their mates. Further, they may have done this consistently before with the same teacher. I haven't met these fascist teachers yet in my time in education who would 'send a child to isolation for their pen running out of ink'. Some schools are of course more strict than others but the whole 'teachers are heartless prison guard devils' narrative is so far off the mark. The only solution I think to this sort of 'parental expose' is to allow parents of said schools to strip away all the rules they don't like, then give teachers bodycams to observe all the behaviours as they are, and not the stories told back to them, which many parents take without question because 'My child doesn't lie'. Oh, another thing, the do-gooders who feature in the accompaying BBC pod who call 'draconian rules' so 'sad', including the researchers at unis, are not in classrooms trying to manage this behaviour - which is often intimidating, incredibly rude and sometimes threatening - they don't ever have to deal with it.