Does my daughter need a toilet pass?

A sensitive and small bladder, without infections. My daughter is the same....once we drink more than 100g of water or liquid we have to go very frequently on some occasions, accompanied with a strong uncomfortable sensation

Do you have a medical issue? If pupils have a medical issue they can have a pass. Most people do not need to pee or poo every hour

What do schools do about the criminal damage to toilets? Someone upthread mentioned £100k of damage in a year. Are they actually calling in the police to help identify the perpetrators and get them prosecuted? If not why not?

So how pupils urinate and defecate if they have a day with one of the urgent poos? I personally need to visit the toilets at least 1 per hour

And all of this comes down to funding. With proper funding, schools might try to put supervisory staff ( but not necessarily teachers) in/around loos so that pupils could use them.

I always find it hilarious how the same teachers on here who are always going on about how parents, inexplicably, refuse to "support the school" and students have no respect for teachers, are the ones who defend these policies.

Generally speaking, you can either force girls to sit there and bleed through their clothes, or you can be respected. You cannot do both.

So on top of the people who think women can just "hold it" when menstruating, we also have someone who is either willfully ignorant about social anxiety, or doesn't understand that what goes on in the bathroom is different than what happens in the classroom.

Toilets aren’t locked at my school either. We are very fortunate with our intake and I’m not going to pretend that it’s anything other than that which means we don’t have to implement measures that other schools do.

Absolutely, @noblegiraffe . It's very easy to be critical of school policy from the comfort of your sofa. Less easy to work out an effective policy.

Have not rtft.
Ar my DDs college there are 'anxiety toilets' which those who need them can use.
V.good.

I am a governor in a primary school and have also worked in education for 20 years (not as a teacher) including 2 x secondary schools. In those schools no toilets were locked.

Well they can if it's between the hours of 10.30-10.40 and 12.30-13.15 and queue up with the other 500 students who behave and have had to bleed onto their clothes or have painful stomach ache from holding their bodily functions in.

People asking why toilets are locked in lesson time are told that it’s because of the vaping, vandalism and other undesirable behaviour that happens in unlocked toilets during lesson time.

The locking of the toilets is in response to, and prevents that behaviour.

Anyone who demands that students have free access to toilets is either declaring a free-for-all to unruly students, OR have to explain which other measures they would implement apart from locking toilets to prevent this behaviour, bearing in mind that schools have no money.

Vaping is addictive, dangerous sometimes, causes bullying and antisocial behaviours and is disruptive. No we can't just let them do it. We have students who are buying cheap vapes illegally and they're no doubt full of toxic crap and they use them so frequently that they can't cope without them. I've seen students shaking with need in the middle of an exam. I repeat, no, we can't condone it.

Before I started teaching, I had no idea what was actually happening in schools. Because my dc are pretty well behaved and go to school to learn. Same as my friends' dc. Same as nearly all MNers. Just this week I've seen things which the average parent would not believe and that's in a v good school. A tiny minority are complex and devastating and will wilfully cause thousands of pounds worth of damage.

We aren't penalising the majority. We are protecting facilities they deserve. If there's an alternative to monitoring toilet use and locking them between lessons, I'd like to hear it.

@LuckysDadsHat - are you a parent governor?. If not, it's a good idea, because there's usually a shortage.

Then can now pee in peace because it's unlikely someone will have trashed the place, produced a cloud of vape, or will be filming them under the cubicle.

To the detriment of other students who behave and just want to pee in peace!

It does work. It has significantly reduced vandalism, bullying and vaping. In tandem with no phones rule we now don't get them filming each other under the cubicle doors.
It's far better, the stats bear it out.

Sometimes. But that's then complicated by things like 'It wasn't her, she just happened to be there at the time', 'You're not allowed in the toilets, so you're just making it up/are you saying that a teacher went into the toilets, that's not right, what they were really doing in there in with children?', 'Don't know what you're talking about, my child would never so much as take a sip of coffee, much less be doing lines with their mates and sharing it on SM', 'It must have haven't just before he went in and you're blaming him because you don't like him', etc, etc.

But it's obviously not working! If things are still being smashed up or people having sex or people vaping locking them is not working. Maybe, just maybe they need to look at other methods rather than punishing students who just want to use the toilet when they need to go like all of us can do on a daily basis at work.

Can imagine it wouldn't be easy - but do kids ever get caught and prosecuted for this sort of thing [particularly the plumbing disasters] - almost all of what you list is illegal to some degree or other?

Vaping illegal substances, snorting others, drinking, self harm, sexual activity or sexual assault, storing weapons in the cisterns for later use, production and transmission of images of child sexual abuse, causing somewhere in the region of £85,000 worth of emergency drain works from deliberately blocking the pipes leading to flooding of classrooms with foul waste, the digging up of the pipes underneath classrooms, followed within a week of reopening with further blockages and then the day after they were fixed, the sinks torn off the walls and every toilet smashed - stuff like that also goes on.

It was even worse during the pandemic, because we had to keep them in the room at lunch and break time as well. A rota for teacher relief was set up - sometimes the delay was excruciating!
(Students were allowed to go on a supervised rota).

No, that is explaining why the toilets are being locked.

Because, like many institutions, smoking (including vapes) is banned on site by most councils. Plus illegal for school kids to buy and smoke.

Staff can't, so pupils really shouldn't be able to vape on site.

As for staff and toilets we had one unisex one on each floor in my last job. You need the bladder of a horse to be a teacher!