School stabbings

For those of you in Britain (which, if I count the number of readers
of this blog amounts to all three of you), you may have recently
heard in the news of a spate of stabbings and attacks in schools.

This article about one of the recent ones caught my eye:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/pupilbehaviour/story/0,16806,1642728,00.html

From the article: "[the victim's] mother... is worried that her
daughter will have to face her attacker. "I don't want Danielle to
miss lessons but the girl should be off for longer," she said.
"Otherwise it is telling the child if you beat someone up you can
have a week off school. She's back there now like she's done nothing
at all."

It struck me how obvious that statement was. In a lot of cases of
severe disciplinary problems you have children who are disaffected
with school. So you punish them by telling them to stay at home for
a week.

Now I am not saying that suspensions and exclusions encourage bad
behaviour from children who don't want to be there, but it hardly
seems a particularly disincentive to misbehave does it?

Further to that, I don't think that it is entirely productive to deal
with misbehaving pupils by isolating them from the school
environment. I think the aim should be less punitive and more
reforming and it seems better to me to be doing that in a school or
school-like environment. Another article in the Guardian highlighted
the work of some special units for disruptive children which had
great benefits for all. But surprise surprise they are drastically
underfunded and anyway, who can be bothered to go to that effort when
it is so much easier to sign a piece of paper and kick the kid off
school property for week.