Does school detention do any good in school?

Detention is a consequence that schools may use to address inappropriate student behaviour. Detentions can be applied during school hours or out-of-school hours. Principals make a decision about what happens in their school in consultation with their school community. Detention is a disciplinary consequence that principals and teachers may use as an alternative to suspension or exclusion. Principals have the flexibility and autonomy to apply detention as a meaningful consequence for inappropriate student behaviour.

What's your opinion on this?



Debate now open

If anything, detention is more of a hinderance on the teachers time than the pupils!

I got detention multiple times, but I never went to any of them... After my last class I just went home, and there seemed to be no consequences on not even showing up. I didn't get detention for anything seriously bad, just messing around in class, so maybe they always just let it slide with me, unlike if I actually did something really bad.

But I suppose either way, if you're gonna dish out a punishment then you need to follow through with it, or at what point/line does a student need to cross before you start to follow through with punishments and even get the parents involved, as to my knowledge, my parents never knew about my detentions I got.

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Originally Posted by Sectional

I got detention multiple times, but I never went to any of them... After my last class I just went home, and there seemed to be no consequences on not even showing up. I didn't get detention for anything seriously bad, just messing around in class, so maybe they always just let it slide with me, unlike if I actually did something really bad.

But I suppose either way, if you're gonna dish out a punishment then you need to follow through with it, or at what point/line does a student need to cross before you start to follow through with punishments and even get the parents involved, as to my knowledge, my parents never knew about my detentions I got.

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Thats exactly what it all comes down to, follow through with the punishment. Also having the same blanket approach across the whole school helps!

Got a 1 hour detention for being late to first class. They were literally just shutting the gates as I got there, and could see my classmates not even in class yet.

Pretty counterproductive and most of the time doesn't achieve much beyond wasting everybody's time.

I used to get detention on purpose when I was in year 9 at school just to look 'cool'. So I don't think it really works, the system my school had was if you miss the 30mins DT then you had to have a hour one and if you missed that you had SLT which basically meant you spent a whole day of school in a room on your own and wasn't allowed out for break time and you'd only be given a sandwich for lunch. Again for me it didn't bother me at all from september to the January i racked up 17 DTs and 1 SLT. I never got a detention again after that January but thats because i met a new group of friends.