Is this abuse?

Yesterday the Observer carried a story about pupil protests in some schools in England against school rules around shorts, short skirts and locking toilet doors during lessons so that pupils are only able to access them during break time. The first two are fairly petty in my opinion; a long enough skirt isn’t too much of an imposition. But the third will put some young people in a great deal of difficulty; there are often good reasons why someone might need the toilet during a lesson, and we cannot generalise from the problems some schools have (those listed including vaping, drug use and bullying in ‘unsupervised’ toilets), or that some specific pupils cause, to imposing a blanket rule on everyone. The article quotes a Northamptonshire headteacher who claims it was ‘ludicrous’ that restricting toilet access was a violation of young people’s human rights.

Why would a child need the toilet during a lesson? Quite apart from a girl unexpectedly starting her period mid-lesson or a complication of an undiagnosed medical problem, the most likely reason is that the break time was too short, or the toilet was too crowded, and they thought they could hold on until the next break, or lunch, or home-time, but midway during a lesson found they couldn’t. Another is that they had to see a teacher about something, or had to run some personal errand (e.g. back to their form room or another classroom to pick something up), or were given a job to do, or were ‘detained’ by bullies for much of their break, or that the queue for lunch was too long. Any number of quite legitimate reasons. I only spent a year at a state secondary school as a child (in 1988-9) and I don’t remember bullying in the toilets being a problem, but neither were the toilets supervised unless a teacher came in to intervene in some problem (there was an office across the corridor, but I do not recall if the person who occupied it was always there). Nowadays, we hear that many schools have toilets that are in a bad state of repair because of years of government underfunding (the Tories axed a major school building and refurbishment programme when they took office in 2010), and that they often lack sufficient numbers of toilets, especially for girls. So, it is more than imaginable that some children find the they cannot use the toilet during breaks.

So, on the face of it, asking a teenager to wait another half an hour to use the toilet isn’t child abuse or an infringement of their human rights, but preventing someone using them when they are quiet who could not use them when they were crowded, is. And yes, it can be a distraction if pupils are asking to go to the toilet “every two minutes”, but this is an extreme situation and any teacher worth their salt will get to know their pupils and will be able to identify serial troublemakers or skivers. We must also understand that people arrive at secondary school at age 11, very much children and in many cases not even close to puberty, and leave as an adult or at least close to it. The discussion seems to treat all secondary age children as the same, but they have very different needs despite being forced into the same space for several hours a day. In addition, surveys have revealed that many children avoid using school toilets because they are dirty, broken or used as traps by bullies; children restrict their fluid intake so as not to have to use them. (This article has a discussion on how to improve school toilet quality, safety and hygiene.)

The article mentions the issue of funding only once, briefly, in an interview with an education lecturer who also raises the issue of children restricting their fluid intake so as not to need the toilet during school hours. This passage is really a brief diversion from an article which takes the side of headteachers and presents the protests, and the parents supporting them, as a problem. If the protests are being led by troublemakers who are only interested in causing disruption or are concerned about their opportunities for criminal activity being blocked, then these people need to be dealt with, but if this was the case, the headteachers affected would say so. (There have been pupil protests around other issues, such as racism and school collusion in it, as with the school where a 15-year-old girl was strip-searched on baseless suspicion of drug possession a few years ago, also not mentioned here.) Why do the parents support them? Maybe because they are having to send their children to schools without adequate toilet facilities, as maybe they had to, and don’t see why they should just put up with it. In some cases, another matter not mentioned by the article, the new rules have been imposed following a school’s takeover by an academy chain, not in response to “safeguarding issues” or vaping in the toilets, and in any case, you don’t safeguard any child by causing them to wet themselves or bleed through her clothes. There are ways to deal with these things without unfairly impinging on anyone else’s rights, something that will not occur to these sorts of people who favour a “get tough” approach.

A parent I know who home educates her children tweeted when seeing this report “glad I home ed”. I should add that education, schooling, doesn’t have the mystique it did for past generations. In the past, it was seen as a ticket out of poverty, but previous generations believed what people in authority, such as teachers and doctors, told them; now, they are more likely to question. Today, people are aware that those in important jobs aren’t the likes of them, but people who went to posh private schools; their local schools are underfunded and broken down, and the imposed ‘leadership’ are taking these problems out on their children with harsh rules and restrictions. It’s no surprise that parents are taking the side of their children rather than the jobsworths.

Image source: Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) Secretariat, via Flickr. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.0 licence.

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