You're not imagining it.

Why doing what's asked earns nothing

Ask a school and you'll usually get an honest answer: points are aimed at change, not at consistency. A child who goes from disruptive to tolerable has moved. A child who was fine in September and is still fine in June hasn't moved at all, so there is nothing for the system to notice.

That's a coherent policy. It also means a child can meet every expectation, every day, for a year, and register as nothing at all, and yours worked that out long before anybody explained it to them.

"But we only give positive points"

This is the most common defence of the whole thing, and it's usually offered in good faith. No negatives. Nothing taken away. Only rewards. Some schools have written the minus button out of the policy altogether and consider the matter settled.

It doesn't do what people think it does. A score doesn't need a minus sign in front of it to be a ranking. If your child has none and everybody else has ten, your child has learned precisely what a red mark would have taught them, with the added difficulty that nothing has actually been done to them, so there is nothing to query, nothing to appeal, and no adult who believes anything has gone wrong.

Zero is only neutral on its own. On a board, next to everyone else's ten, zero is a negative, and it's the one nobody has to justify.

It's also the quietest version of the problem, which is why it survives. A child who loses points at least gets told why. A child who simply never gains any gets no explanation at all, because from the front of the room nothing has happened.

Why the most challenging children collect the most

The points are being used to build a relationship and encourage a small step forward, which is a kind and reasonable instinct from a teacher trying to hold a room together.

But look at what that child is actually receiving. A child who finds school genuinely difficult (who can't settle, can't organise themselves, can't hold it together after lunch) is being handed points. What they need is support: somebody to work out why, an adjustment, an assessment, an adult with time.

The most challenging children tend to collect the most rewards, when what they need is the most support.

There's a reason that substitution happens, and it isn't cynicism. A point costs nothing and takes a second. Support costs money, takes months, and sometimes involves admitting that a school cannot currently meet a child's needs. A system that dispenses points is, among other things, a system that looks like something is being done.

The rest of the class, meanwhile, can see the board. Thirty children work out fairly quickly that the ones who find it hardest to follow instructions are the ones being rewarded most. Whatever that teaches, it isn't fairness, and it's the first genuinely unfair thing many children ever meet from an adult they trusted.

Why points can be taken away

A point earned is supposed to describe something that happened. Removing it says the thing didn't happen. Nothing else in a child's life works that way: you don't un-win a race on Thursday because you were rude on Friday.

It survives because it's fast. Deducting a point is the quickest consequence available in a busy room, which is also why it doesn't teach anything. It ends the moment, and leaves the child with a debt rather than a lesson.

Why it's on the wall where everyone can see

The public part isn't a side-effect, it's the mechanism. Comparison is what gives a scoreboard its force. If the scores were private, most of the pressure would go with them, which is precisely why they aren't.

So a slip that would once have been a quiet word becomes a visible change in status, in front of the audience a child most cares about. Adults would not accept this in any workplace, and would say so loudly.

Why it follows you home

The notification is not there for your child's benefit. An app that lives on a parent's phone is an app the school finds hard to drop, and a product that reaches a far larger audience than the classroom it was sold for.

The effect is that a running commentary on a seven-year-old's day arrives on your phone at twenty to three, stripped of everything a teacher would have added if they'd told you in person. It isn't a report. It's a score with no context, delivered to someone who can't act on it.

For some children, the thing being scored is the disability

Sitting still. Making eye contact. Remembering the book. Arriving on time. Not reacting to a noise everyone else has filtered out. For an autistic or ADHD child these are not lapses in conduct: they are the exact features of the condition, and they are exactly what a points system counts.

So the child isn't being scored on their behaviour. They're being marked down for the way their brain works, several times a day, in front of everyone. And because the score is a number, it arrives looking like a fact about the child rather than a fact about the system that produced it.

Points are the front of a pipeline

A point is not the end of the road. Points become detentions, detentions become a record, and the record becomes the evidence for a suspension. We know quite precisely how that pipeline distributes, because the government publishes the figures every year, and the same groups have been at the wrong end of them for as long as anyone has been counting.

The points app did not cause any of that. Exclusion disparities long predate it. But points are where the record starts, they are the earliest visible expression of the same judgements, and they are the only part of the pipeline a parent can see before it becomes something more serious.

It doesn't create the bias. It launders it.

Two children do the same thing. One is read as having a difficult morning; the other as having an attitude. That judgement is made in about a second, by an adult with thirty other things happening, and the evidence is that it is not made the same way about every child, which is what the research on adultification bias describes.

A points system doesn't invent that. What it does is convert it. A judgement call becomes a figure on a board, and a figure doesn't look like an opinion. By the end of term it is a total, and by the following September it is what the next teacher knows about that child before meeting them.

The law has moved further than most behaviour policies

In February 2026 the Upper Tribunal held that a school's duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled pupils applies to the operation of its behaviour policy: to sanctions and exclusions, not only to admissions. Plenty of behaviour policies were written before anyone had put that to a tribunal.

Treating every child identically is not the same as treating every child fairly. It only looks the same from the front of the room.

And nobody looks at the numbers

The single thing a points app is genuinely excellent at is generating data. Which means every school running one is sitting on a term's worth of evidence about who collects points and who doesn't: searchable, exportable, already paid for.

Almost none of them have ever broken it down by SEND status, ethnicity or free school meal eligibility. It costs nothing but a filter, and it is the one question that turns all of this from an opinion into something a governing body has to do something about. It's on the list.

We are very bad at noticing harm that arrives quietly

Ask people which is more dangerous, nuclear power or burning coal, and most will say nuclear. It isn't close. Per unit of electricity generated, coal is associated with roughly 24.6 deaths per terawatt-hour and oil with 18.4. Nuclear is 0.07, and that figure already includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The reason for the gap between the numbers and the intuition is that nuclear kills in events. They have names, dates, a place you can point to on a map, and footage. Coal kills continuously and invisibly, in ones and twos, through air that nobody photographs. One of those is frightening. The other is merely fatal.

There's a detail in the Fukushima figure that makes the point better than the headline does: the great majority of the deaths counted against it came from the evacuation rather than the radiation. A significant part of the harm was caused by our reaction to the danger rather than the danger itself. That is how badly the instinct performs.

None of which is an argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe, and it isn't an argument about energy at all. It's an argument about how unreliable we are at weighing a harm that never turns up as an event.

Nothing here is a disaster. That's the problem.

No single thing a points app does is a scandal. A child gets no point on a Tuesday. A name sits at the bottom of a list for a fortnight. A five-year-old works out, quietly and without telling anyone, that they are one of the ones who doesn't get things. Any one of these is far too small to report, complain about, or photograph.

Now multiply. One hundred and ninety school days a year. Eleven years of compulsory schooling. Millions of children, in this country and in many others, most of them scored several times a day by an adult holding a phone.

Very small, multiplied by enormous, sustained for a decade, is not small. It is simply not photogenic.

And unlike most items on the list of things wrong with the world, this one is unusually cheap to fix. It doesn't need a treaty, a budget settlement or somebody else's government. It needs a school to look honestly at what it is already doing and let the research inform it. Turn off the public totals. Stop deducting what was earned. Train the staff properly. That is a settings change and some professional development, and nobody has to wait for permission to start.