You've noticed. Now what?
What you can actually do
Nothing here requires you to be an expert, make a formal complaint, or fall out with your child's teacher. Most of it is a conversation, and the first one costs about ten minutes.
Pick whichever you've got the energy for. Doing one is worth more than reading all of them.
First, the thing stopping most people
You are not being that parent.
The most common reason parents say nothing is the fear of sounding precious, of being the one who complained because their child didn't win something. It's such a widespread worry that parents apologise for it in advance, before they've even raised it.
But notice what's actually being asked. Not "give my child more points." Something more like: is this system fair, is it doing what you think it's doing, and who decided it? That's a reasonable question about a policy that runs on your child every day, and any school worth the name can answer it without anybody falling out.
It helps to know you're not alone in it either. This is one of the most-repeated complaints on British parenting forums, and has been for a decade. The staffroom knows. Quite a few teachers agree with you.
Start a conversation
Talk to your own child, carefully
Ask open questions rather than leading ones, or you'll get the answer you've signposted. You're trying to find out how the system looks from inside the room, not build a case.
"How does the points thing work in your class?""Who usually gets them?"
"What happens if you lose one?"
"Does it bother you, or is it just a thing that happens?"
Two things worth listening for: whether they can explain what the points are actually for, and whether they describe the system as something that happens to them rather than something they take part in. Both tell you a lot.
Ask one other parent
At the gate, in the group chat, at a party. Say what you've noticed, in your own words, and then stop talking. Almost everyone who does this finds at least one other parent has been thinking the same thing and assumed they were the only one.
This matters more than it sounds. A single parent raising it reads as a grievance about one child. Two or three parents raising the same point reads as feedback about a policy, and schools respond to those very differently.
Take it to the school
Read the behaviour policy
Schools have to have one, and most publish it on their website. Read it with a single question in mind: is the app or points system actually named in there?
Surprisingly often it isn't. Plenty of these systems arrived because one teacher downloaded something to get through a difficult term, and were never signed off, reviewed or written down anywhere. That's not a scandal; it's a decision that was never really made, which is a far easier thing to reopen than a policy somebody fought for.
Write to the headteacher
Short, calm, specific, and about the system rather than about your child. Say what you've observed, ask your questions, and ask for a written reply. Nine worth including:
Can points be taken away once a child has earned them, and what's the reasoning?
Deducting an earned point says the good thing retrospectively didn't happen. It's the single change most likely to be quietly dropped once somebody senior has to justify it out loud.
If the school only gives positive points, what does a child with none look like next to a child with twenty?
"We don't do negatives" is the standard reassurance, and it answers the wrong objection. It deals with punishment but not with ranking. A child on zero has learned exactly what a red mark would have taught them, with nothing to query and no adult who thinks anything has gone wrong.
Is any child's score displayed where the other children can see it?
Public totals are the part that does the damage, and the part schools most often haven't thought about. Many switch to private scores when asked, and lose nothing by it.
What adjustments are made for children with SEND, and where are they written down?
Systems that dock points for lateness, lost kit and forgotten homework penalise precisely the things some children find hardest. An adjustment that exists only in one teacher's head disappears the moment that teacher does. In February 2026 the Upper Tribunal confirmed that the duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled pupils applies to how a behaviour policy is operated: to sanctions, not just admissions. There's a printable briefing on all of this if you need something to hand over.
Can you show me the points data broken down by SEND status, ethnicity and free school meal eligibility?
The app already holds it and almost nobody looks. Nationally, the same groups sit at the bottom of these systems year after year, and points are the front of the pipeline that ends in suspension. Running that filter costs a school nothing, and it's the question that turns a parent's impression into something a governing body has to act on. If the answer is "we've never looked", that is itself the finding.
What's the research behind this app, and what did the school look at before adopting it?
Everything else bought for a classroom is expected to arrive with an evidence base. A 2024 review of classroom behaviour management apps found fifteen peer-reviewed studies, only just over half meeting basic quality standards, and just three that measured learning at all. The most-cited peer-reviewed paper on ClassDojo by name is a critique rather than a trial. And the Education Endowment Foundation, where English schools are normally sent for evidence, says reward systems help as part of a broader strategy, while noting UK research on reward systems alone has been inconclusive. Ask politely. The answer is rarely "a review".
Who reviews whether it's working, against what measure, and when was it last reviewed?
A polite and entirely fair question that very few behaviour systems have ever had put to them. "It calms the room" is a real answer, but it's a measure of noise. It doesn't say what any particular child is learning to feel about themselves to produce that quiet. A proper review checks both.
Was this a whole-school decision or a classroom one?
It changes who you're actually talking to, and whether the conversation is about a policy or about one exhausted colleague's coping strategy.
What happens to the data: who holds it, where, for how long, and what was I asked to agree to?
Behaviour records about a named child are personal data, and a running log of a seven-year-old's conduct is not trivial data. See below.
of parents didn't know whether their child had been signed up to a system using their personal data at all
That figure comes from a Survation poll of just over a thousand parents of school-age children in England, carried out for the campaign group defenddigitalme. In the same survey, roughly a quarter said they were never told when their child's data was being stored or shared.
You are on solid ground here. The Information Commissioner's Office publishes a code of practice for online services likely to be used by children, the Children's code, and it explicitly covers educational technology. Asking a school which company processes your child's behaviour data, what it's used for, and what happens to it when they leave is not an awkward question. It's the question the code exists to make answerable.
Make it collective
Raise it at parents' evening, as a question, not a complaint
You have a slot, a teacher's attention, and a legitimate reason to ask how your child's behaviour is being recorded. "How does the points system work for children like mine?" gets a far more useful answer than anything phrased as an objection, and it puts the question in front of the person who uses it every day.
Put it on the PTA agenda
Behaviour policy rarely comes up at a PTA, which is exactly why raising it there works: it moves the subject out of individual grievance and into something the school hears as a shared parental view. You don't need a proposal. "Several of us have questions about the points system" is enough to get it minuted.
Ask a parent governor to take it to the governing body
This is the one with actual teeth, and the one most parents forget exists. Governors hold the school to account for its policies, and a behaviour system that has never been formally reviewed is squarely their business. A parent governor can ask for it as a standing item, and unlike a letter, it lands somewhere with a minute-taker.
Support the campaign
Send this to one person
Specifically: send it to the parent you had that half-conversation with at pick-up, the one that trailed off because neither of you wanted to be the first to say it properly. This site exists to be the thing you send instead of finishing the sentence.
Hear when there's something new
The campaign is a website and a body of research at the moment. It's heading towards something more organised than that, and the people on this list will be the first to hear what, and when.
Parents, teachers, governors, journalists and researchers all welcome. Especially teachers, who tend to have the sharpest version of this argument and the fewest safe places to make it.
Keep me posted
No noise, no streaks, no points for opening the email.
Done. Look out for an email.
Unsubscribe whenever. We're making a point about consent, we're hardly going to skip it here.