A group of parents publicly criticized one of Australia's most prominent private schools last week after students were isolated as part of a disciplinary response to sneaking off to a nearby pub. The incident has drawn renewed attention to how schools handle serious student misbehavior.
According to Phys.org, parents criticized Geelong Grammar, a prestigious Victorian private school, for using isolation during a yearlong boarding school program. A group of Year 9 students had left the campus at night and gone to a nearby pub. The school responded with a five-day internal suspension for some of the students involved.
The Australian reported that some students were also isolated for specific periods during that suspension. This included being alone for 30 minutes after morning tea, one hour and 10 minutes after lunch, and 90 minutes after lessons. The students then reportedly remained alone in tents from 6:30 p.m. until the following morning.
The school defended its approach. "It is essential that we can trust students to remain in their own units overnight and violating this trust has serious implications for the well-being and safety of our community," the school said in a statement. "Our imperative is to create and maintain an environment where students are safe, feel safe and behave safely; this is critical to enabling wisdom."
The Australian also reported the school asked for "absolute discretion" from parents regarding its authority to "impose disciplinary measures."
The incident came alongside reports that the number of students receiving school suspensions across Victorian public schools increased to almost 30,000 from the previous year, roughly 150 per day.
Both situations have prompted broader questions about what effective and appropriate school discipline looks like. Researchers in neuroscience and developmental psychology say the teenage brain offers important context for why young people take risks in the first place.
The prefrontal cortex, which handles planning, self-control, and weighing consequences, is one of the last brain regions to fully mature, often not until the mid-20s. At the same time, the brain's reward and emotion systems are highly active during adolescence. Teenagers are drawn to excitement, novelty, and social rewards at precisely the time when their capacity to pause and think through consequences is still being built.
Prominent U.S. adolescence psychologist Laurence Steinberg compares this to driving a powerful car with excellent acceleration but brakes that are still being built. That combination helps explain why teenagers are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, especially when they are with friends.
Researchers also note that early adolescence is a period when young people are working out who they are, becoming more independent, and testing boundaries. That process, they say, is a normal part of development rather than evidence that something has gone wrong.
