Teachers: do you find it hard? (high school toilets)

Where's the money coming from to pay for the toilet monitor?

It's only 2 hours til break its not like theyre made to wait all day

Schools have no money and no staff. We don't even have enough teachers to teach the kids let alone spare people to watch toilets.

I’d keep her off until they sort her pass. My DD had a toilet pass due to problem periods, first one being so bad it lasted 28 days of heavy bleeding and a blood transfusion. Thankfully that happened in school hols and then she was at home with covid lockdowns so never really needed the pass as she went on the pill after a few months, but helpful to have it. I understand why they have the rules, but I can imagine some kids must have accidents if become unwell. I’d be so angry if my child had an accident if they were sick and been denied permission.

Have to stop so no one gets killed. Kids cannot take their seatbelts off on the coach while it is moving.

Basic safeguarding which will be on the risk assessment. So the coach will just have to stop every 10 minutes for toilet stops given one where they are all asked to go at the same time is inhumane and cruel.

You cannot use a toilet on a coach when it is moving. At no point can a child take a seatbelt off and use the toilet. Basic risk assessment. Kids have been killed in the past when they have taken their belts off so no child is permitted to take their belt off at any time. A teacher would say a living child in wet clothes is better than a dead child in dry clothes.

So should the coach stop for every child who needs it when they need it? Every 10 minutes maybe?

I’m not saying that I agree with all of this but the way.

But honestly a lot of the students that want to go to the toilet A LOT are ones who will use ANY reason to get out and stay out of the classroom; they often have multiple issues ongoing around behaviour; they often come from complicated families.

How teachers are supposed to navigate this I really don’t know… One minute you’re explaining quadratic equations to year 9, the next you’re wondering whether little Jenny really does suffer badly with her periods or whether little Johnny is actually just having you on.

It’s a nightmare, and lots of parents and people who’ve not seen it simply wouldn’t believe it - specifically the complexity, cost, and relentlessness of it.

Omg, a system that sends texts to your parents when you've been to the toilet?? That's actually horrible. No wonder so many kids hate school.

Used to work in schools and found this rule a nightmare. I understood why because we had SO many issues with kids just mucking around in the toilets but it was just rubbish. I used to send kids if I thought they were genuine and senior leaders didn’t like that but sod them. I’ve been on placement in one school where the kids had to go and collect the key for the toilets if they needed it. In a way it worked because, for example, if Kelly hadn’t brought the key back in 20 mins there was either a problem or she was mucking around. Likewise there was a log of who was in there at what time so if graffiti was done we knew who it was. But it was an absolute faff and imo a waste of everyone’s time.

Maybe toilets with a one in one out door policy (students scan their student card to get in?) so no messing around with their mates, and there’d be a log of who had been in the toilets should damage be caused? And then just fire alarms in there so that any vaping would be obvious.

Honestly it does my head in even having to think of ways around this because as an adult I’d be livid if I couldn’t just go to the toilet whenever I needed to, but we had so many safeguarding incidents and general terrible behaviour from a minority that it was sort of needed. Having to explain to a parent why their daughter had been jumped on in the toilets during lesson time was horrendous. Saying those other kids were allowed to the toilet just in case they were genuinely desperate and would have otherwise had an accident just didn’t cut it, but we couldn’t have CCTV and couldn’t have someone inside the toilets monitoring things for obvious reasons.

Also adding, I advocated for a policy of staff having to be in pairs to enter student toilets but they were having none of it because of staffing issues. But we had male senior leaders entering female toilets because they believed kids were mucking around and I found that wholly unacceptable. Bloody ridiculous.

Toilets and uniform were my worst nightmares 😂 I miss the job but don’t miss the drama!

Jesus wept…

it is not ‘main character syndrome’ to have a bowel condition or diabetes or a kidney issue where urgent and immediate access to a toilet is essential.

nor is it unusual for a girl’s period to come on unexpectedly and heavily when they are young and just getting to grips with them.

thank the Lord that my bowel condition came on and my diabetes duagnosed after I left school as I couldn’t have survived with the locked toilets that are so common in schools today .

it is nothing to do with mental health having a medical condition where you have seconds to get to a toilet - but I guess it becomes one when you suffer the humiliation of an accident in front of your classmates because schools policies are so inhumane .

If I had wet or soiled myself in class as a teenager - I would never ever have returned to school again as the bullying would have been insufferable.

I really feel for the kids of today.

I work in a secondary school.

There are soooo many variables around toilet use.

Toilet cubicles are literally the only areas of the school site that aren’t supervised. Even the circulation and handwashing spaces in the toilets open straight onto corridor in my school.

Internal truancy is a problem. In the past maybe those kids would have just wandered out of school or not been in school at all but it’s not like that now. They literally locked in.

Vaping is a huge issue

Phone use and teeing up fights is a huge issue

Drugs and bullying have been issues

Graffiti directed at individuals is an issue

the toilets generally being crowded and unpleasant at breaks also means some kids find it more acceptable to go during lessons.

And how can a teacher really know what’s going on with a child’s excretory system other than being told ‘I’m doing for a wee miss, I’m going to wet myself’?

How so many girls have flooding and unmanageable periods I don’t know… the toilets are well stocked with free, branded Sanpro and students can take as much as they want, wherever they want home with them, for free.

i also think it’s a bit of ‘main character’ culture… why should I be a bit uncomfortable and wait to go to the toilet, why shouldn’t I go and have some unsupervised time in the toilets if I want to, I want to go now, and I’ll start mentioning my mental health if I’m not allowed.

Every toilet visit in our school is recorded and we spend a large portion of each day paying to staff toilets. There are definite repeat offenders.

Now whether the school environment and curriculum actually suits all student is the real question we should be asking IMO…

You're right, it's not fair. But the only way to ensure that children do have access to a toilet is to restrict the times to when they can be supervised (and then access is completely unrestricted), otherwise nobody gets access to them at all.

No I don’t have money to pay for mindless vandalism …

but I also don’t think it is fair that normal kids can’t go to the loo and have to soil themselves / bleed all over the place for want of needing a toilet in an emergency… as they are all locked because of the mindless few…

I know there is no simple solution but I do believe that every child should have the ability to use the toilet at school.

i couldn’t go to work in a workplace if I didn’t have access to a toilet and I don’t believe children should suffer this indignity either.

as so often - the minority ruin it for the majority.

Do you happen to have a spare thirty grand knocking around to repair the damage done by four teenagers in ten minutes, though? Every toilet smashed, sinks off walls, water everywhere, the need to dig up half the playground in order to remove the towels/blankets/other kids' clothing/bags of cement they've brought in and flushed before they took hammers/etc/ to the pans, mirrors and windows smashed, suspended ceilings brought down and the framework bent beyond repair from the weight of them climbing on each other's shoulders in order to dangle off it, doors off hinges, lighter fuel sprayed around and set alight, floors flooded and going through to the wiring for the lights in the floor below.

Then repeat it with the next set of toilets. And then the next. And the accessible toilet(s). And once a set has been repaired, give it a day and it happens again if they aren't only opened under supervision.

On the positive side, whilst putting the vandalism online for other kids to watch and take inspiration from, usually at least one is thick enough to make themselves or a mate easily identifiable so they can be suspended for a few days.

It's happened in multiple schools I've worked at with completely different demographics of kids.

I'm fairly sure that none of them would do anything like the level of damage to the toilet at home, but get them in school and unsupervised for even such a short period of time as that and, even if it's a small number overall, the scale of the damage can be crippling - and nobody's going to be impressed if the entire school has to be sent home because there are literally no functional toilets on site.

Probably have to stop anyway for the coach driver’s tachometer.

Yes it's outrageous, can you imagine if professional working adults were told you can't go to the toilet? They'd all walk out.

Most coaches have a toliet you can use. Every school trip I had, had one. Plus even if it doesn't, that's one time. Just because it happens occasionally on a school trip (to be honest, I always had access to toliet on coaches or planes and I think most do), doesn't mean we should then apply it to all the time 24/7 during school. Plus I know that buses will often stop and we'd get off and go to the toilet, especially when any girls were on their period, my teachers didn't mind. But this rarely happened as the coaches had toliets.

Just because a teacher can't doesn't mean a students shouldn't have to, it doesn't mean they both have to suffer out of fairness.

Do you think kids 'suffer' when going on a school trip without instant toilet access? How do these kids manage on a coach to say Thorpe Park or France when they cannot use the toilet whenever they please?

Should they be banned to prevent human suffering?

As someone who can very occasionally go from not needing the loo to being on the point of pooping their pants, I can't get my head around this. Particularly as I also used to have extremely heavy periods as a teenager. I get the behaviour issues, but stopping someone from going to the toilet can cause embarrassment, it can impinge on their dignity (think teenage girls with a heavy flow, who can bleed through) and can make people ill.

In DS‘ class last year (age 7/8, German school, 2nd year of formal schooling), each kid was given 2 toilet passes a week. They had to hand in a pass when going to the toilet. This helped weed out the kids skiving in the toilets and those who genuinely needed to go.

They‘re in school for between 4-5.5 hours a day (variable timetable), finishing at lunchtime.

Yes true, I do think we should have more toilets around, but if you read all of that I've said, they would be allowed to quickly do that (not very regularly, they should plan around lessons where they can) but if they left the door wide open, alerted the teachers next door, ideally they could stand in the corridor and watch both, it would be allowed and teachers weren't told of.

A lot of this is a symptom of bad SLTs who constantly berate teachers, and that's one of the major reasons for teachers to leave the profession. SLTs who don't support teachers at all and never listen to them, which creates a bad culture of fear and also disengagement that trickles down to teachers and students.

But that's for a few minutes. A dentist can go pretty regularly (more than a teacher), so not having to go for 10-20 minutes whilst doing a filling isn't an issue. However, I have had, dentists quickly leave and leave me with their assistant for a few minutes (I don't care, it's a human urge, they come back and finish my appointment). Again, yes a driving instructor can't but a driving test will be for x amount of time and then they can.

Just because a teacher can't doesn't mean a students shouldn't have to, it doesn't mean they both have to suffer out of fairness. Teachers have extra rights and responsibilities as PP have mentioned. Funny how when it comes to some little jewellery or some painted nails, the argument that teachers can do it so students should be allowed, is criticised.

In practice the issues you talk about happening in the toilet, even with a 100% ban, will still happen, so rather than focusing on a trigger of those issues (also happening in the toliet) we should be focusing on those issues as a whole. Most schools I know now have gotten smoke/vape detectors specific to each.toliet (I had this is school years ago). The reason schools 'care' when it happens in the toilet is because them it highlights the problem to everyone, particularly parents. Yes schools pastoral teams are stretched but so many more schools now just have rules for the sake of conformity to an unreasonable extent. Yes students will self-harm, but when kids aren't coming to school when they're anxious and have horrible mental health, the response (in many schools not all) isn't to help them, the same when kids haven't done much work in a lesson because of they are struggling, are quite regularly punished or not helped, or given access to resources. Sometimes a kid may want to walk around school because they need a break and some quiet, I know it's hard with safeguarding, but we really need to think about why so many students are reporting those issues and reform so many areas if education, but that's a conversation for anther time. Kids are still being stabbed or even worse killed at schools with 100% bans, it will happen in the playground or a corridor. So stopping them going isn't stopping the problem, it's just putting a band-aid on it, and stopping it happening in one place. When instead we should be focusing on various policies to tackle those issues, jot all of it is down to school, some is parents, government etc, but everyone has a part to play and everyone is failing in some way. Partly due to the breakdown of the relationship between school and home.

Walking next door to grab textbooks isn't the same as walking the length of a corridor and down a flight of stairs to get to the toilets.
One of my happiest years as a teacher was the one I had in a room right next door to the female staff toilets...

But that does depend in schools, most yes but the schools I have experience of teachers can leave, if they have the door open and they're encouraged to get a teacher nearby to stay inside, but if they can't for a few minutes they can. Obviously most use discretion, and with certain classes, some teachers won't, but if they need to grab some textbooks, most just quickly go.

@hardtocare Tha should never happen. They know she has heavy periods, and has bled through before and can't make give her a toilet pass. You should report that if you can (maybe further up the academy trust, if it is one or Ofsted etc), because she's already had one incident and it's not a good thing to further cause anxiety over it. Can you get a note from her GP? To act as medical evidence. This is a further problem, teen years are the start of gyne issues even if it doesn't come to a condition, some people just have primary dysmenorrhea and if they do have a condition, it won't have been diagnosed by that point, so they won't qualify for a medical card yet. Lots of girls are uneducated about menstrual and reproductive health and won't even know it's not normal. There has been research showing more girls just not coming in at all for their periods, and to be honest, I don't blame them. It's creating more anxiety and shame around periods, when we already have a culture of not talking about menstrual health and downplaying symptoms, saying 'oh just get on with it' and expecting girls to not complain because they're being overdramatic.