[sims] Managing Detentions

[fiza]

How do you guys manage detentions in SIMS?

do your teachers record the behaviour incident and set the detention?

Or do you have a detention officer who looks at all the behaviour incidents requiring a detention and then sets the detentions?

how do you manage it if a student is already in a detention that day?

 

not really my area but we are looking at the best way to manage it.

[vikpaw]

Teachers would usually add them, but you must make sure they first create and save the behaviour incident first, otherwise you get an unlinked ghost.

You could get someone to manage the process, but it's must better if you can get the staff to do it themselves.

If they already have a detention, they will have a Red D in their register so the staff member would already know for that day. Not sure what you do for future dates, or even if it warns you. It might do if they were at the same, we have them pre-created and they don't clash though. I guess the kid will tell you too

[3s-gtech]

We pre-create the detentions, then staff edit those. Creates a behaviour incident when they add the student to the day's log.

[Kyle]

We also pre-create the detentions then staff add the behaviour incident and then add the student to the already set up detentions.

 

We do have the odd one or two teachers who decide they want to add their own detention instead of looking for the pre-created ones.

 

I wish i could stop permission to teachers adding detentions!!! Or can i?

[3s-gtech]

AFAIK you can't stop them from making their own currently. It's infuriating, and takes ages to fix the data!

[tombry]

We handle it in both ways.

 

When I was hired the school had only been using the behavior system for a term - and it was already a mess. They had teachers issuing detentions, and whatever staff member was in charge of the detention handling the escalations, which led to students getting escalated when they shouldn't have been, as well as being let out of detentions they shouldn't have been.

 

First thing the assistant head put me on was cleaning this up, so I started by making it so that any changes to a student's detention had to go through me, and all escalations were now handled by me. This got rid of the student's ability to play teachers off each other (as a non-teacher I was able to follow up with teachers straight away), and after a half-term all the students knew to come see me when they wanted a detention changed or argued.

 

To carry on from this I started pulling Ach/Beh/Det reports and noticed that some teachers had more than twice as many BI (incidents, not points) as Dets, a bit more digging and I found that they were assigning BP off the register, then opening up whatever detention they wanted a student in and putting them straight in, essentially doubling up on the students, also noticed that this was the cause of my issue knowing who had assigned the BP, as when adding from the detention screen, it doesn't count on the teacher's initials (not the way I pull it anyways, and breaks my detention register, as it doesn't show who assigned the detention) - so all those detentions they were giving weren't going to the teacher's name, but the BIs were - this took another term to get teachers straight on, but still rears it head today (2 years on), as some just refuse to do things the "right" way.

 

Today our system is a smooth running machine - teachers give students detentions, I escalate them, and outside of the few instances where teachers are in a hurry, I don't have many being put in straight from the detention register.

 

As for what happens when a student is booked up, as I handle all escalations I just keep moving forward to their next available date, last year in January I had a Y11 student that had detention every day until exam leave, and would have carried on from there, but he wasn't in school.

 

As for the effectiveness of detention - I think lunch detention has less value than after school, but for some students it won't matter no matter how many you give them.

 

I will say that my detention attendance is phenomenal though from when I started - we had three kinds of dets when I started, Lunch, After School, SLT, and total attendance was about 56% my first year, now we have Lunch, Senior Tutor, and SLT, and all three hover around 80% attendance, and our after school learning period (it's not a detention, but is) is at 90%