🎒🏫 The Quiet Ways Schools Taught Us to Sit Down and Shut Up

🛠️ RSO™ Offcuts - Isolation wasn’t just a room. It was the carpet, the corridor, and the back desk where you disappeared.

This started as a comment under a teacher’s essay defending removal rooms. I read it and mmm’d all the way through it, as I remembered my school days.

Now, I haven’t read the original research paper back to back, looked at the methodology, or confirmed what type of study it was, whether it was peer-reviewed or in what category. I can be a tad of a science snob (my second degree is Biology) and certain fields that deal with human behaviour and society are sometimes less rigorous for many reasons — like lack of objective measurability and public perception influencing the outcome.

But this is about personal experience and how it doesn’t align here.

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The University of Manchester study found one in twelve students spent time in isolation each week, often more than a full school day. Even if that number feels inflated, I believe their bigger point (that exclusion is normalised and often invisible) is closer to reality.

I highly recommend giving the article a read to form your own opinions and see how well it aligns with your own school experience and the kids around you now.

Is the study a good one? Meh, maybe.
Are they both biased? Meh, maybe.
Am I, without reading the actual study? Absofuckinglutley.
But experiences are experiences, and the study displayed in the article doesn’t feel that far-fetched.

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'Teachers: you're doing it all wrong,' say people who have never taught a class.

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So when I read Tom Bennett’s defence of isolation rooms, it didn’t match what I remember. He paints them as safe, structured places run by calm adults. Maybe that’s true somewhere. But where I went to school, isolation was messy, emotional, and usually improvised.

I’m not sure what schools this writer has been in (we all have different experiences), but growing up plenty of students were removed and left alone.

When I was younger, they’d make a kid sit on the carpet to ‘think about their behaviour’ while the rest of the class carried on. In high school, some teachers had back rooms they’d stick kids in to work on their own. Others had to stand outside the classroom for the rest of the lesson, doing nothing. There were even desks at the back where you’d be sent if you’d annoyed the teacher, and the rest of us were told to ignore whoever sat there.

The whole point was to make them invisible so they couldn’t piss about with anyone. So yeah, maybe eight and a half hours a week sounds exaggerated, but isolation happened all the time. It just wasn’t always official.

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And it wasn’t always the kids who were already struggling with disruptive or dangerous behaviour. Some were just independent thinkers who weren’t afraid to question the tutor. I remember one boy in history who proved the teacher wrong. The teacher literally dragged him out, threw his jacket after him, and slammed the door. Those kids took some serious shit, and the longer it went on, the more abrupt and ‘disruptive’ they became.

Sometimes you got punished for asking too many questions, for being ‘disruptive’, for being a bit too sharp, or for cracking a joke and laughing. One teacher even had a ritual of isolated humiliation — made us all stand; if you answered a question right, you could sit and everyone clapped. Get it wrong and the class would make the game-show buzzer noise, and you had to stay standing until you got one right. The last person standing got booed. Tell me that’s not its own form of humiliation and isolation. This method was also used throughout junior and high school.

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Of course, sometimes kids need to be removed for safety — no one’s arguing that. But what I saw wasn’t about safety; it was about control. The kids weren’t violent, they were inconvenient. And the line between the two was decided by the teacher’s ego, not any policy.

I only remember two kids ever being removed for something truly dangerous; one with scissors and one who threw a chair. The rest didn’t deserve the treatment they got. They were just kids who clapped back.

School was not a ‘place of safety, governed by predictability, stability and dignity — the sense that you matter, and can be successful,’ because it was dominated by the whims of a fair few teachers. The kids who were told to leave didn’t just lose connections and education; the ones who couldn’t ask questions in case of ridicule lost theirs too.

I was once told by a maths teacher (I suck at maths): ‘You obviously didn’t listen, did you?’ Then she moved on without answering my question. I asked because I didn’t understand, not because I wasn’t listening. So I asked the person next to me, and we both got told off for talking. The teacher had the cheek to say, ‘If you’re stuck, you ask me.’ I said, ‘I did,’ and got kicked out, on my own.

Maybe the numbers aren’t perfect. But if that many students are saying they feel excluded, ignored, or humiliated, maybe the question isn’t whether the data is clean — it’s whether the system is.

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We learned early that curiosity came with consequences. It wasn’t about behaviour — it was about obedience.

The kids who stayed quiet, or played the game, were rewarded. The ones who asked ‘why’ were disciplined. Every time a kid got removed, the message was clear: don’t stand out, don’t challenge, don’t think too hard.

The study also pointed out that students with SEND were twice as likely to end up in isolation. Looking back, that tracks, the quieter, anxious kids often disappeared for days. It’s no coincidence that girls reported lower wellbeing too. Being excluded, whether publicly or quietly, eats away at your confidence.

We didn’t just lose lessons. We lost belonging.

I hated school and often pulled a sicky just to avoid going in. Sometimes I went truant, sometimes I’d ‘miss’ the bus, anything that meant skipping the morning lessons with certain teachers. Other times I’d not return to school after lunch and skip the last two lessons, the middle ones were harder to miss. Once you were in, the school locked its gates. You couldn’t get out: aside from a few cracks in the fences the teachers watched like hawks, just in case anyone tried to do a runner.

I spent far more time running from school than in it. And I wasn’t a disruptive kid. I was one of the weird ones, with a small circle of friends. Quiet, always raised my hand, never shouted. But I saw enough punishment to absolutely hate it.

I have very few teachers whose names I remember for good reasons, and even fewer I’d go back and thank for allowing me to question and challenge them. Debate skills and independent thought weren’t valued by all teachers.

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Do you remember removal rooms or the kids who ended up there? Did they really deserve it?

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