The more schools I see the more I become convinced that implementing detentions should almost always be a whole school system, rather than something left up to individual classroom teachers to issue, communicate and hold, especially where it comes to follow up for non-attendance. It just guarantees a huge variation in consistency. Because it relies on the teacher having the confidence, organisation, willpower and workload to implement it, and those are factors that wax and wane depending on the circumstances. Arguments that this degrades the teacher’s ‘agency’ never seem to describe what, precisely, the benefits of this agency actually are.