Since joining Tanfield School, the leadership team and I have been reviewing how the school has been working, including the behaviour policy. As part of this review, students and parents were asked to complete a survey giving their views. Over 50% of students felt that behaviour in school was not good and 33% of parents felt the same.

Ofsted reported in 2014 that there is an average of one hour lost a day to low level disruption in schools across the country. This adds up to 38 hours of learning per student, per year being lost. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that one disruptive student in a class of 25 can reduce the earnings made by those students by 3-4% by the time they reach 26.

As a school we care deeply about our students’ learning and value every second of learning time. We have decided to change the behaviour policy to ensure every student in the school can learn in lessons without disruption.

The new policy is attached. Please note: each time a student disrupts the learning, they will receive a consequence for doing so; detentions will be completed on the day they are set.

We will let you know when your child has been given a detention. The detentions will be half an hour long, unless a student gets two detentions or more in a day, in which case it will be 45 minutes long.

We don’t want to give any student a detention, but I hope you realise that this has to happen if a student chooses to break a school rule. Failure to attend a detention will result in them being in isolation the following day. If students need to be somewhere else at the end of the day, or will have difficulty getting home, I hope I can count on your support to ensure your child doesn’t get themselves a detention. Unfortunately, there will be no excuses for not doing a detention if they have behaved in a way that warrants one. Thank you for your support.

Yours sincerely,

Mr S Clough

Headteacher

 

Click here to see our new Behaviour System

Click here to see our new Behaviour Cycle