Thank you, @zenactive . I appreciate the solidarity, as it is like bashing your head on a wall trying to have conversations with these people who seem determined to declare the sky is bright orange, the Sun is green and the moon is purple. Disconcerting, very worrying for the children who will be impacted by such irrational behaviour blindly believing everything a school does by definition must be correct, and refusing to accept any factual evidence proving the contrary.
What a depressing state of affairs it all is. A few teachers like @howchildrenreallylearn have come forward to be honest about the reality but most seem to have this siege mentality and view any type of request/ communication/ complaint from a parent as “vexatious” and “harassment”. Of course staff must be protected from intimidation, violence or threats, but it’s quite a leap from that (which I’ve not seen a single person disagree with) to claiming that any critique of a school or its staff is unwarranted, that what schools refuse to comply with the law and parents complain this is “harassment”, and that schools refusing to rectify their behaviour and resolve these complaints and restore legal compliance necessitating the parents contacting them about this repeatedly means that the parents are at fault and should be demonised, or even arrested based on false allegations of crimes that clearly never took place.
I hope that something comes out of these parents being brave enough to publicise how appallingly they are treated. I think a “me too” type campaign where parents can post anonymously what has happened to them - because of the risks that the article and accounts on this thread highlight of speaking publicly about it due to this intimidating by schools and the potential impact that may have on their children - might be the only way to amass the evidence so that politicians can no longer ignore the scum floating on top of the pond in the education profession, which must be scraped off so that the teachers and the children can breathe again. I genuinely cannot see anything improving in the education sector - for staff (so that those like @howchildrenreallylearn don’t leave, which is so sad), and for the pupils damaged by this appalling behaviour from schools, not to mention the impact on their families - until a powerful, zero-tolerance regulator is put in place which immediately suspends staff while reports misconduct is investigated and then imposes sufficiently significant fines on schools and Local Authorities for every single case of law breaking to remove the financial incentive for this behaviour. This would also significantly improve the relationship between school and parents because a competent independent body would resolve these disputes rather than it being left up to individual parents to try to enforce the law in every individual case of this type of appalling behaviour from schools, and then these poor families demonised and gaslighted for doing so. That’s just not a reasonable expectation of vulnerable families already dealing with disabilities, and you can see from the comments on the thread what such a dysfunctional system leads to: false assumptions that the family must be at fault, because surely otherwise a school would never do this…
Yet we know that they do, court cases prove this over and over again. It’s actually incredibly rare for a a court to find in favour of the school in a dispute between a family of a child with SEND and their school. Yet somehow, these facts don’t seem to register with people who’ve never had to deal with it and they assume that school staff will behave professionally, that there are proper checks and balances and oversight in place… but there aren’t. The only solution is to replace OFSTED with a real regulator who comes down like a ton of bricks on this and Local Authorities then having the financial incentive to be pressuring Head Teachers to comply with the law, rather than the opposite perverse incentive that exists now. And for the individual school staff involved to know that if they were aware of breaches of the law/ regulations and didn’t whistleblow, didn’t act, condoned or went along with it, they will have their professional qualifications removed and be barred from working with children in perpetuity.
Let’s hope that these brave parents subjecting themselves to yet more invasion of their private life for the public good actually initiates some change in the sector, which is very long overdue, and fewer disabled children in future have to be subjected to the safeguarding risks to which this school subjected the girl in the article, that fewer families have to cope with such horrific treatment by schools in future, and that teachers’ working environment will also be far more pleasant when the law is properly enforced (surely it’d be less stressful for them being managed by competent management, knowing professional and ethical standards and the law is upheld, that disabled children are treated with respect, and they’d obviously have to deal with far fewer complaints from parents or relationships with parents that become difficult if this was the case!).
The solution is so obvious, yet bizarrely you still get these delusional education staff working against their own interests as well as against the interests of the children, posting the kind of nonsense we’ve seen on this thread. Anyone who complains MUST be being “vexatious” and of course the school must be correct and wouldn’t be being unreasonable, because they’re a school so by definition they must be right at all times and parents should just shut up.
It’s horrific, and I really hope a change in coming. It has to or the whole system will collapse. But sadly, when you see the utterly clueless comments from Phillipson and her policy proposals, articles talking about “changing parental expectations”, absolutely no grip whatsoever on what the problems are or any kind of plan to fix them, she obviously isn’t going to be the person to do this. She’s actually talking about trying to make it harder for parents to enforce the law, rather than clamping down on schools and Local Authorities who break it, and ensuring a regulator enforces the law like in every other sector, so that the parents aren’t having to do it themselves. Just as delusional as some of the posts from teachers on here: such an approach will make things even worse for children and teachers.
I hope eventually the UK will manage to put together something vaguely resembling a functioning education system. It will require much more funding and a lot more scrutiny, strengthening of the rights of children and very strong regulation and enforcement to change the culture, but it’s clearly going to take many more parents like Maxie and Rosalind stepping forward and exposing the reality of it (that it’s in a greater state of collapse than even the NHS) before this will happen.
Schools, per this article, actively try to bully and intimidate parents into not speaking up so many people are unaware of just how bad it is and then you get the “no smoke without a fire nonsense”, when in fact the fire has been burning for 30+ years and is now an inferno and these parents did not start it, they just got thrown onto it as more fuel by this Head Teacher.
Isn’t is also interesting how @noblegiraffe hasn’t been back to this thread for days because it did not go how she’d hoped, yet she’s been happily posting on this one instead trying to derail that:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5306127-maxie-allen-and-rosalind-levine-arrested-the-vindictiveness-of-the-school-and-police-overreach?page=10
One can only hope that a sufficient number of people are rational enough to see that changing this rotten culture in schools and providing decent education to all children must be a national priority now, as important as defence, and that any staff who support illegal, bullying, discriminatory and intimidating behaviour to families must be removed from the profession, not defended by people who refuse to accept that a teacher can be anything but angelic.