Nicky Mountford

Today I talked to a young person who stopped going to school in Year 7. He told me, when we looked around the school they said that detentions were only for when you did something really wrong and most people didn’t get them. Then, when I got there, I found out that in nearly every lesson someone got a detention. The teachers were always giving us detentions and I was scared. He said, they really pack things into your head. You get into the class and there’s a ‘First do this’ on the board and you have to sit down and do it immediately. Then the teacher gives you more to do and it doesn’t matter if you can’t do it all, it just keeps moving on. You can’t ask your friend how they are doing it because you can’t talk. You’re always worrying about what happens next and whether you might get a detention. He said, I couldn’t do it. It made my head hurt and by lunchtime I couldn’t go on. I know I was learning a lot but I couldn’t keep going. He’s out of school now and at an alternative setting. He said, I can stay all day there, because they don’t pressure us. I couldn’t believe how relaxed they were when I started. They don’t give us detentions and I didn’t think that would really happen. I’m learning things. There’s no way for this to be fed back to the system. No one asks those of us who work in mental health what the side effects are of our local school. No one measures mental health as a key outcome of educational and behavioural policy. No one looks at children’s behaviour and attendance as feedback on the system. He’s not an isolated case. I hear stories like his all the time. Kids who cannot cope with high pressure and high control environments and who start not attending school as a result. Kids who tell me that they are constantly fearful of getting it wrong. You won’t solve that by fining or threatening their parents. We have to ask what is happening in our schools, and whether many of them are becoming environments in which children cannot thrive. Exam results aren’t enough. We have to ask about the side effects of the system.