Do you think the three Cs method for managing bad behaviour is effective?

It strikes me as a thoughtful and probably effective rationale.
I think there is sometimes virtue in reflecting, sometimes a punishment given in the heat of the moment may be disproportionate. We expect kids to take consequences. Adults don't always get it right.

 

An appropriate curriculum, including physical activity and creativity is also important..
For some students this could include unicycles!

 

I think these three Cs would be very effective although there could be some legal implications:

Confinement
Corporal Punishment
Capital Punishment

 

Naughty!

 

'Behaviour hotspots' Sounds like targeting teachers there.
However with many kids who misbehave you will have gone through all the steps by first break on Monday!

 

There are no quick fixes.

And this isn't one.

 

After working in a challenging school on the behaviour front, it works effectively with 90% of the students. The question now is what about the extra 10%? What happens when children don’t mind the consequences because they’d prefer to sit in detention than go home because their home life is chaotic, or some other reason?

 

@Lalex123 is correct, it's not the system as such, it's how prepared the school (and SLT especially) is to keep driving it onwards and deal with the repeat offenders.

Perhaps it's just because I go to bottom-end schools but 3Cs (under a variety of names) is now the only show in town. Some work well, others don't.

 

Sounds like a good system. It requires funding which schools in my area don't have. We can't afford a member of staff to run an isolation room, nor could we staff the off-site 'compass centre' which sounds like an important part of the process. It doesn't say who is responsible for running the after school detentions. There are pros and cons of these being managed centrally or by individual teachers. However, let's say that in a school 10% of the students are causing problems - or 3 in a class of 30. For teachers of subjects such as music / drama who might teach between 200 and 300 students, this means managing between 20 and 30 detentions a week. Thus it is tempting to only hand out detentions for high-level problems because you already have 4 difficult students to manage tomorrow night and don't want to add to the list. So low-level issues can slip through the net.

 

In most schools I have worked in, staff are on a rota for detentions so they are all run centrally. I teach 500 pupils and luckily we don’t have to run our own detentions!

 

Sounds like more work for some sappish middle leader who won't get any more time or money for the pleasure.

 

I'd forgotten about that vital part of the process, "who runs the detentions?". You can't have teachers running it. A long time ago I discovered in late June that the first detention I could book for a regular miscreant was in September (and the middle of September at that). When I pointed this out to the Pastoral Head I got a resigned shrug. Also as Bessie S has pointed out there is inconsistency from teachers and that is aggravated by how over-booked they are for detentions. There has to be an SLT run detention system with the Lead SLT responsible for chasing up absences and poor behaviour or it is an non-starter. Teachers can also staff this on a rota basis or whatever but they shouldn't be expected to lead it.

 

I agree that getting the follow-up right is way more important than what you call your various stages of escalation.

In our school, C2 detentions are arranged and sat by subject teachers, C3 detentions are centralised and sat by middle leaders on a rota. The kids have figured out that subject teachers will use their detention to get them to catch up on work, while the middle leaders don't normally know what work they need to catch up on, so the detainees just get to sit there doing nothing. Many students prefer C3 detentions to C2 detentions. This means that as soon as I give a C2, those kids will then provoke a C3 on purpose. This means that I avoid giving C2s too early in the lesson, because once that C2 has escalated into a C3, I have nothing left to threaten them with and the student can basically do what s/he wants, having nothing left to loose. (Yes, there is a removal system, but most of the time the teacher on removal duty is busy and doesn't turn up for 20 minutes.) Most teachers find themselves dragging out C1s indefinitely, telling badly-behaved students "the next time you talk over me, you've got a C2" about 15 times, before giving a C2... OR you start by giving them a merit for opening their book, so that your first stage of escalation is the cancelling of that merit, and you earn a bit more time before you have to give a C1.

Largely pointless and a huge source of distraction for teachers and students.