Exclusions don’t work. And neither do isolation booths.

The use of exclusions and isolation booths in schools has recently come under fire – most of you will be familiar with the #BanTheBooths campaign, which has seen many question both the effectiveness and morality of these styles of deterrents.

Let’s start with exclusions.

Exclusions are not a punishment or a deterrent: they’re a day off school.

Excluding pupils for a long period of time means they miss valuable teaching time and are immediately put at a disadvantage. I thought the aim of exclusion was to remove and then reintegrate pupils who have behaved poorly. But surely the removal makes the reintegration really hard. When a pupil is weeks behind their peers in terms of content, everyone suffers: the teacher, the pupil in question and the rest of the class. The system just isn’t working.

There’s evidence to suggest that exclusions mainly target minority groups, ensuring their continued disadvantage in education. A department for education study found that working-class pupils are four times more likely to be excluded than their middle-class peers and that only one in five excluded pupils achieved five pass grades at GCSE. The study also found that the most excluded group was black-Caribbean boys.

Exclusion doesn’t help to improve behaviour but instead widens the ethnic and class differences in educational achievement.

Now for isolation booths.

They are immoral and ineffective. Forcing a student to sit in a room for long periods of time, without speaking or doing anything productive is a waste of their time and of the school’s. Parents have criticised the “barbaric” punishment for being more like a custodial sentence than a deterrent – arguing the effect on children is more negative than positive in relation to their behaviour. Keeping someone sat for hours at a time, only being allowed to look one way is not going to calm them down and make them behave better, it will make them angry and go on to behave the same if not worse.

Schools generally use exclusion and isolation booths as a way to remove disruptive pupils from the classroom and allow others to learn. However, Ofsted research has shown they are also used for “off-rolling” students just before GCSEs so that they don’t count towards the school’s league tables, removing large amounts of students from education entirely.

Behaviour has gradually become a huge problem in schools. So much so that two third of teachers have or are considering quitting because of behaviour problems, according to the Policy Exchange Think Tank.

There are many factors of bad behaviour; some internal to schools and some external. But if a school, if you continuously treat a child in a certain way, putting them in isolation booths or excluding them for days at a time, don’t be surprised when they continue to act out.

Jaya Plant is a Year 12 student at a comprehensive school in South London.