One in 12 secondary pupils put in isolation rooms at least once a week, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/oct/23/one-in-12-secondary-pupils-put-in-isolation-rooms-at-least-once-a-week-study-finds
Posted by jammiedodgermonster
One in 12 secondary pupils put in isolation rooms at least once a week, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/oct/23/one-in-12-secondary-pupils-put-in-isolation-rooms-at-least-once-a-week-study-finds
Posted by jammiedodgermonster
11 Comments
This sounds scary, and plays into the delinquent youth narrative, but at a lot of schools use isolation as a punishment for very minor infractions like uniform violations. It once happened to a classmate of mine for wearing the wrong kind of black sock!
Mirrors my experience of state school in the 2000s. One to three troublemakers ruining every class making learning for the other twenty seven impossible
Then they disappear at 16 with zero GCSEs under their belt and the school experience improves infinitely but by then, the damage to everyone else is done.
Would love to know how many of the pupils are from single-parent households, data already shows academic attainment is lower when compared to their peers where both parents are together still. I wonder if it would also translate to behavioural outcomes as well.
I work in a special school for children with very challenging behaviour. Isolation rooms were removed in 2007.
It is im strictly against the rules to leave a child in a room in their own. We have literally sacked a teacher for doing this.
I don’t understand how these schools get away with this.
Spent ALOT of time in isolation during school and suffice to say my people skills definitely suffered as a result.
The issue, which I always bring up whenever these sorts of stories roll around, is that behaviour in our schools (not all of them) is bad. It makes it impossible to teach and it ruins the experience of the kids who want to work hard and do well. Some schools have thus brought in a sledgehammer approach to dealing with behaviour, and overall it’s effective. Teachers and schools are operating with limited resources, and internal exclusion is an effective tool for removing disruption from the classroom.
I am ideologically against the use of internal exclusion, but until someone can suggest a better tool that works within the budget and dynamics of a school environment I’ll remain supportive of it. I’ve actually only worked in one school that used internal exclusion – a large comprehensive – and I think I only sent a student to internal exclusion twice in my time there because it was an effective deterrent. Behaviour was never a major concern and I could teach freely, and we got excellent academic results.
Schools face a damned if you do, damned if you don’t conundrum. Crack down on behaviour and you’re being punitive and compared to North Korea. Don’t do anything about it and everyone complains about that as well.
Ultimately, the issues schools face when it comes to behaviour are not the fault of schools themselves, but rather issues in wider society which schools can’t control. This is especially true in less affluent areas where issues stemming from poverty and trauma are more likely to rear their head.
It’s a survey of mainstream state schools in Manchester. I wonder whether the results would be different if they surveyed private schools in Surrey.
The use of isolation rooms should absolutely require mandatory reporting. It’s unacceptable that schools can use them for minor punishments. It would also show how often students are disrupting lessons with violent and abusive behavior.
The insistence on placing kids with severe learning difficulties or extreme behavioral issues in mainstream schools while making it almost impossible for schools to exclude those who make it impossible to teach is failing both those who struggle and those impacted by missing out on being taught due to these issues.
A single kid in my daughter’s old primary school school class disrupted almost every lesson. He scratched several kids faces resulting in permanent scarring, spat on, punched and kicked his classmates on a daily basis resulting in several broken arms, black eyes and head injuries. This went on for over a year. He was eventually expelled after he attacked a pregnant teacher.
Families are arguing that their kids are being deprived of an education by being put in isolation for having violent and disruptive behavior. These kids need more than mainstream school can give them. It’s unacceptable to subject whole classes plus their teachers to violence and deprive them of an education due to the behavior of a single student. They are all being failed.
I will repeat myself.
My previous school (where I taught) in England had cameras in some classrooms for health and safety (think computer rooms, science labs). It was great as we could show the students their own behaviour. Even better, on some occasions, we’d get the parents in and show them too, if they claimed their angel “couldn’t possibly have done that.”
I would love for this to be the norm across all schools and even to have public webcams in classrooms so all could see what we deal with day after day.
People here talk about uniforms and other minor things – yes, that is a big problem with schools using isolation for silly things like that.
But I dare say most schools use it appropriately.
What is the purpose of it? Students, especially misbehaving ones, love an audience. They misbehave even more when they are amongst their peers. They really dislike spending time by themselves, as that deprives them of their audience. So, that’s what we do. If you can’t behave in a way that allows me to teach and everyone else to learn, you can go sit by yourself somewhere else. The other 29 kids have a right to education and they don’t have to suffer your shenanigans.
Now, stats about minority/disadvantaged/LGBT etc kids being placed in isolation more than others need looking at to see the underlying reasons.
The question is, is that enough?
A child with no interest or ability to learn should not be allowed disrupt the learning of those who want to learn. Full stop.
It’s the same kids, over and over. They either don’t learn from their mistakes because they don’t care and their parents don’t care, or they have SENs which are incompatible with mainstream schooling.
This article, and the one accompanying it, make the parents of children who regularly find themselves in isolation sound a lot more engaged than they usually are. It also only provides anecdotes from the parents’ perspective – notably the schools’ side of the story is missing. I gave a wry smile after it was revealed that the child who apparently spent a week in isolation for running in the corridor also had an autism diagnosis. No child spends a week in isolation for hurrying to the toilet – there is much more to this.
Ultimately there are 30 kids in a class, and if one or two continually misbehave and don’t respond to other forms of encouragement or sanction, they will be removed for the good of the rest. A teacher cannot spend half a lesson – every lesson – trying to get through to the same kids. Similarly, if a child has SEN beyond the very mild then they should be in a separate SEN school. Re-establishing SEN schools is the best move the government could make to improve education in the UK.
Source: I’m a secondary school teacher.