FROM THE ARCHIVES: “Just Give Them A Pen”
Why do teachers issue sanctions for children who turn up without a pen?
As an occasional extra, I plan to share slightly re-edited or updated versions of old blog posts, particularly when they seem topical. Following a ludicrous tweet from the Fabian Society’s Education Policy Group and the resulting discussion, I have decided to share this post from May 2022.1 I realise that’s not long ago, but I would imagine many of my Substack readers have never seen it. It explains why I think expecting pupils to bring a pen to the lesson is reasonable.
An academic is shocked that schools have rules
Some people on Twitter, like this educationalist, seem to hate the fact that schools have rules.
Ignoring the question of why the taxpayer is funding people with such low expectations of children to train teachers, I wanted to single out the daftest of the complaints here: the objection to enforcing the rule that pupils in school should have something to write with.
Who says poetry has to be good?
The objection to rules about being equipped to write has been immortalised in what I think is a poem. In the alleged poem, child neglect is used as a reason not to enforce rules:
This is performative compassion. It’s all about how the adult feels, rather than what’s best for the child. It’s not actual compassion, because reporting child neglect is the compassionate thing to do. Lowering expectations to normalise, or even conceal, neglect is not compassionate. Any school that assumes its pupils are suffering neglect is a safeguarding risk. Children’s suffering should be reported, not built into your expectations. That’s not to say that while neglect was being dealt with a child wouldn’t receive help, including help to ensure they are properly equipped for the day. However, there is no obvious benefit to changing what’s expected in lessons.
Back to reality
Assuming we are designing rules for the best interests of the students, not to display our virtue, the case for rules about equipment is pretty straightforward. Or at least it is if you are familiar with even halfway challenging secondary schools. One has to assume that people who oppose such rules imagine a completely unrealistic scenario for such schools. They believe that occasionally one child forgets a pen, entirely by accident, and politely asks for one at the first opportunity. The teacher immediately lends it. At the end of the lesson, they return it without being asked. This might well happen in the most privileged schools.2
What happens in tough schools where rules about equipment are not enforced is quite different. Every lesson, several children (usually the ones who are slow to engage at the best of times) will sit doing no work. When confronted individually, they say they don’t have a pen. When told they should have one, they argue. The teacher lends out pens, which will amount to dozens per day. It will add minutes to the time it takes to start the lesson. This extra wasted time will be when the teacher is already very busy, either supervising children entering the classroom; settling the class, or setting up the lesson. Few pens are subsequently returned. Several are destroyed. The same routine is repeated if work requires a pencil, a ruler or a calculator. The teacher ends up buying pens with their own money. The school may well become littered with broken pens.
Of course, if required, teachers can invent routines to prevent this waste of time and resources. Unfortunately, the methods of saving time, usually waste more resources and the methods of saving resources, usually waste more time. Nevertheless, you end up with all sorts of pen-lending routines. Examples include:
Requiring pupils to identify their need for a pen immediately.
Making a pot of pens available for pupils to collect.
Counting pens in and out.
Making pupils swap something they can’t afford to lose (perhaps a phone or a shoe) for a pen.
Writing the names of students who have borrowed a pen on the board.
Even if these routines are effective, they are more effort for all concerned than requiring everyone to bring in a pen.
Often the routines are not effective. After all, what you are doing is lowering expectations. Children should be able to bring a pen to a lesson. They often have a pen, they are just wasting time for the sake of it. By lowering expectations, you are doing them no favours. You are making them into worse people. In the worst school I worked in for low expectations regarding equipment, it became so normal for pupils to help themselves to pens without asking, that if you didn’t put a freshly stocked pot of pens out for them, they would rifle through your cupboards and desk, hunting for pens. Because replacing pens was expensive3, and the departmental supplies would run out early in the year, some of us would stock up on pens by just picking them up off the floor in corridors and on break duty. Kids would discard them all over the place, because they were being taught pens were worthless. As far as they were concerned, the only person who should care whether they were ready to learn in lessons was their teacher. Nobody was benefitting from these low expectations.
Experiences that showed me the benefits of having a sanction for not bringing in a pen
Something I have seen many times, as have many other teachers, is the pupil who turns up without a pen until they are reminded there is a sanction for this. Suddenly, they find a pen that they had all along. When I’ve asked some of these pupils why they asked for a pen, many have said “I just couldn’t be bothered to get it out”. What you permit is what you promote, so by treating having a pen as optional, you promote this.
The experience that most informs my thinking on this was a school I worked in that changed its expectations. A policy was introduced of giving 45-minute detentions to anyone who turns up to lessons without equipment. Even I think this is too harsh; I’m sure a lighter sanction would have worked. Nevertheless, what I saw was a transformation. Suddenly, every child had a pen, pencil and ruler. In particular, I remember a pupil who was dyslexic, dyspraxic and deaf who had never brought a pen to any of my lessons. It would have been easy to assume a child like that couldn’t manage to bring in a pen. When the detention policy was introduced, he transformed overnight. He brought a pen to every single lesson without fail. As did almost everyone else. I left that school and returned a few years later. The policy had been abandoned, and once again there were pupils in the lower years who never had a pen. However, those who had been at the school when the detention policy was in place remained good at bringing in pens. Some adults believe that you can never achieve good behaviour through punishment alone. On this issue, I have seen that you can, and you can help children form good habits that way too.
Some people don’t like rules. Others believe you can have meaningful rules that you don’t ever enforce. Some think children are helpless and hopeless and, in particular, they believe any type of SEN means a child should be written off as incapable. Others cannot imagine that a child would choose to do wrong. There are even those who think that enforcing rules is done only due to sadism, and that children live in fear of their teachers. However, in the real world, everyone is better off if children bring their own pens in. If that will only happen through enforcing a rule that says “bring in a pen”, then there’s no good reason not to.4
You can find the original version of this post here. But the new version has subheadings and footnotes; has been more carefully edited, and doesn’t have random ads appearing.
I hate to admit that this is probably how it is with most of my current classes. However, I am blessed with a disproportionate number of top sets this year. I wouldn’t have been able to claim this in most years of my teaching career.
With hindsight, I should probably have said “time-consuming” rather than “expensive”. I resent the effort of shopping for pens more than the expense. However, it should be noted that many of those who oppose sanctions for turning up without a pen claim pupils may not be able to afford a pen. They often also believe simultaneously that pens are so cheap a teacher won’t mind handing out 30 a day.
There was a single comment on the original blog post, which I will share here. CITC said:
The saddest aspect of this scenario experienced, is the routine collection at the end of each “lesson”, of broken pens. In addition to the common excuse “too long to get my equipment”, it is an affront to see such wasted resources from those with latest version mobile phones in pocket and fashion trainers on feet, yet fail to be in possession of a single pen. Fortunately, this attitude may be used with that of laboratory safety. If a simple mentality of preparation of stationery equipment is effort, then so will be the effort to plan lessons of practical interest. Analogy often made with building construction site safety: do not expect to be paid if you attempt to enter a site without your safety shoes…