Here's Jenni Russell writing in, of all places, The Guardian this week ...
It was never in any election manifesto, and yet it will be one of this government's most disastrous legacies. The transformation of the relationship between adults and children into one of caution, suspicion, confusion and fear will outlast many other Labour reforms. Stealthily, and without open political debate, we have moved from the assumption that all adults have a role in socialising children, towards a new and uncertain world in which contact with children is increasingly regulated by officials and the state. It is a kind of collective madness, in which the boundaries of what we are allowed to do shift too fast and too secretly for us to keep up.
This week a dinner lady at a village primary school was sacked for telling a child's parents that she was sorry their daughter had been attacked in the playground at school. Carol Hill had found seven-year-old Chloe David tied up by her wrists and ankles, surrounded by four boys, having been whipped with a skipping rope across her legs. Hill had rescued the child and taken the boys to the headteacher.
That night she bumped into the parents, who were friends of hers, and offered her sympathy. It instantly became clear that the parents had not been told the story by the school. Their daughter had arrived home traumatised and refusing to talk about what happened, with a note saying only that she had been "hurt in a skipping-rope incident". As soon as the school discovered that Hill had told the parents the truth, she was first suspended for several months, and then sacked by the governors for "breaching pupil confidentiality".
This is a new world, in which schools may effectively lie to parents about traumatic events affecting their children, and yet where the only offence committed is by a person who unwittingly breaks that official secrecy. It is no longer the proper role of adults, even those in a tiny village, where everyone knows everyone else, to discuss the behaviour of children. It is for the state to define who may speak and who must be silent.
To officialdom, this is perfectly acceptable. What happened in Essex isn't an aberration, but evidence of a new philosophy in action. It's one that expects people to act not as concerned adults, but as automatons. Yesterday morning the chief executive of the National Association of Headteachers was asked what he thought Hill should have done in the instant that she realised Chloe's parents were in the dark. His response? That she should have refused to comment, and then followed "proper procedures and processes" within the school if she was unhappy with what the family had been told.
You don't have to be an employee to fall foul of the new norms. Parents are being caught out by them too. In London this July a mother was banned from her five-year-old's classroom for politely asking another child to stop his continual hitting of her son. Repeated requests to the school to do something had had no effect. It turned out that she was breaking the unwritten rule that says that no unauthorised adult – not even a parent – can remonstrate with a child.
In Tyne and Wear the same month, a mother who asked a group of bullies to stop attacking her young daughter was arrested in front of her children and held in a cell for five hours after the bullies retaliated by falsely claiming that it was she who had attacked them. Once again, the adult was punished for attempting to uphold the rules of civilised behaviour. Nothing in the system supported her. Talking to the children had made her a legitimate object of suspicion.
This removal of general authority from adults, and its gradual replacement by state-sanctioned interventions, is utterly corrosive. It infantilises grown-ups, who lose one of the roles that societies have always expected them to fulfil. It makes them timid, and demeans them in the eyes of their children, who see that they are powerless in the face of injustice. And by suggesting that adults may not approach, discuss or reprimand a child, it completely undermines the notion of a community, and the importance of social pressure and shame.
Exchanging these traditional bonds and constraints for sanctions imposed by schools, courts and police is not only wrong-headed, it is doomed to failure. The state can't enforce order everywhere and at all times; nor should we want it to. Last week's inquest into the appalling deaths of a disabled teenager and her mother who burned themselves to death after years of bullying by a local mob of children, showed how powerless communities now are in the face of monstrous behaviour. The police were indifferent to their torment, and no adults dared to fill the vacuum. The children jeered that they could do what they wanted, and that no one could stop them. They were right. And the longer we continue on this deluded path, the more divided and out of control our society will be.
As you might expect, Guardian readers had quite a lot to say for themselves. "OxfordBags" said ...
It is for the state to define who may speak and who must be silent.
And don't forget, part of the punishment for those who fail the state in this regard is "the process".
The most extraordinary thing about "the state" is that they are represented by our employees. These headteachers, these doctors, these local authority panjandrums are meant to work for us. God forbid you fall short of their high standards and opinion; you'll see passive aggressive reaction, dressed up in all its awful public service ethic, the like of which is frightful. Usually in the name of "confidentiality"; that's the increasing cover-all for cover-ups.
... and "sadoldfart" (I think I know him?) wrote ...
Jenni, thanks. You've linked all our concerns over recent incidents into a coherent narrative.
However ...
Add to this Contactpoint.
Add Potentially Dangerous Person Legislation ("a person can be classed as a PDP if police have evidence of their crimes but do not have the backing of the Crown Prosecution Service to charge")
Add the the new Vetting and Barring Scheme (the requirement to ask anyone taking part in activities involving frequent or intensive contact with children or vulnerable adults to register)
One malicious rumour and you're a PDP and you'll fail registering with children.
All these factors have broken Society far more effectively than any previous administration. How can we reclaim our communities, our children and our presumption of innocence? Any ideas, Jenni, because short of civil disobedience I'm stumped?
However, by far the most frequent response from Guardian readers was to ask whether they'd stumbled into the Daily Mail by mistake. Which begs a couple of rather interesting questions: (a) why the hell are they reading The Guardian in the first place, and (b) is the Daily Nazi the only newspaper that (supposedly) campaigns against these misuses of power?
The GOS says: It is indeed an excellent and very necessary article by Jenni Russell. I have two observations to add ...
I have seen first-hand the kind of gung-ho attitude that rules in education, though I observed it in a County Council education department rather than in a school. My line-manager at the time would frequently use words to the effect that "I will make you all do what I say whether you agree or not. All decisions in this department are mine to make because if anything goes wrong, I'm the one that will be blamed. I'm responsible and you aren't, and that means I can do as I like."
And secondly, I have a feeling that there's a hidden agenda behind the dinner-lady story that the press haven't discovered. They've told us that Great Tey Primary School have sacked the dinner-lady because she told parents what Head Teacher Debbie Crabb had not - that a little girl had been tied up in the playground and whipped with a skipping-rope. They have also told us that one of the four boys responsible for the whipping was the son of a school governor. Naturally there's been widespread outrage both in the village of Great Tey and nationally.
But what the newspapers have not discovered, it seems, is that this little village school is no stranger to strife and controversy. A report following inspection by the Diocese of Chelmsford (it's a church school) mentions that the school has had what it describes as a "turbulent" past: so much so that in 2006 the head teacher and the entire staff were replaced.
It's very tempting to wonder whether this latest event involving a seven year old girl, is in fact a manifestation of years of simmering resentment about some past conflict or other, finally bursting to the surface? But given the education world's penchant for sweeping stuff under the carpet, we may never know the whole truth.
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