I wrote this article just over a year ago:

http://womenmakewaves.co.uk/targets-detention/

I still stand by what I said at the time, but every time I reread it, I think about other things I should have added.  Granted, if I added everything I’ve thought of, the whole thing would be novel-length, but I think I can work out a bit of an appendix here.

A major problem with secondary schools (from the point of view of the students, anyway) is that children aren’t that hot on long-term planning.  You can tell a twelve-year-old at the start of Year Eight that they only have six years left in school, but six years is half of their life so far.  Your average twelve-year-old thinks of their eighteenth birthday in the same way religious people think of the afterlife- they have faith that they’ll get there one day, but it’s so distant and so removed from their current lives that it’s hard to get a meaningful picture of it.  As far as the twelve-year-old is concerned, school might as well last for the rest of their life.  In a way, it does- the eighteen-year-old who leaves the school will be a very different person to the twelve-year-old who’s still stuck in it.

The child’s parents might encourage them to think of university or career possibilities, but those are too distant to mean much.  If they really enjoy a lesson, they’ll be motivated by that, but mostly, they’re going to be motivated by “what will and won’t get me yelled at.”

You get yelled at a lot when you’re twelve.  For my Year Eight class, it all started on the bus to school in the morning, where we could get yelled at by the bus driver for not moving down the bus, or move to the back and get yelled at by the older kids who’d claimed it as their territory.  Then it was time for registration, where you’d get yelled at for making too much noise or not having your homework diary signed, even if it was because a relative had been rushed to hospital the night before (because you should have seen that coming and got it signed earlier in the week).  When your lesson had been unexpectedly moved to a different classroom, you got yelled at for being late.  When your lesson had a supply teacher, you’d get yelled at for behaving in the way your usual teacher expected you to instead of the way the supply teacher did.  If you waited at the same bus stop as the boys from the school next door, you’d get yelled at by them (half of them telling you that you looked like a man, and the other half calling you a dirty bitch and ordering you to shag them as soon as they learned how).  Then, finally, you’d be off home, where your parents may or may not have found a reason to yell at you as well.  In a case like that, your only options are to scurry about like a frightened mouse and hope nobody notices you, or to hit the surly, “I hate everything” stage of adolescence and decide that, if you’re going to get screamed at no matter what you do, you might as well behave as badly as you like.

All of which is to say that, at that stage of life, it’s difficult to concentrate on a lesson even before you factor in the cramped classrooms and the target sheets.