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

[Fillyfrog]

DD started high school yesterday. We had a transition support meeting before starting (possible asd) and SENCO offered a toilet pass due to lots of anxiety over needing a wee and not being able to go or find a toilet (this is long standing and not just due to new school)
Children are allowed to go at break and lunch and that's it, if they need it any other time it's tough.

Toilet pass wasn't sorted for today and DD begged to go in her last lesson. She said she was close to tears and the teacher still said no. Absolutely not.

I know they have rules for a reason. But, even if she didn't have anxiety and a possible toilet pass

What if someone gets a sudden stomach ache and needs to go to the toilet for a poo quite suddenly?
What if a girl comes on their period suddenly and needs to go and it can't wait until the end of the day? I can't imagine how heartless the teachers must feel to look at a child close to tears on their first day, desperate for the toilet and to just say no and that's it 🙈 it's hard to comprehend as an adult who is able to go to the toilet whenever they want to. It feels like a basic human right.

This thread and a few others this week make me feel that it is high time children at school had some of the same rights as adults
Its school not the army

A lot of this will come down to SLT of the school, but classroom teachers are often quite divided and entrenched on toilet. I’m now SLT and our policy is that students must always be allowed to go to the toilet and yet we still have some parental complaints about teachers saying no and very occasionally we’ve had children wet or soil themselves when they weren’t allowed to go. I sometimes get tired of telling people that they should not be stopping kids from going. It’s most often newer staff who then get used to the system but a few people are oddly stubborn about it. This half I expect to be saying this a lot.

I find it very concerning. I’m a secondary teacher and it’s up to us what we do. I always let girls go - I’m a bit tougher with boys - particularly if I reckon they just fancy a break but it’s a pretty basic human right to go to the toilet.

Ridiculous. I went to a shit school with lots of behavioural problems. However there was never ever any bullshit about whether people were allowed to go to the toilet. It just wasn’t an issue and I can’t understand why it’s such an issue today. Just let the kids go to the loo ffs. Twice a day at break and lunch isn’t enough. I use the loo more often than that.

This is a worry I have with my son who has just started secondary. He hates to use urinals and I don’t blame him, it seems like a big intrusion of privacy. And often times he goes from 0 to 100 on the urge of needing to do a poo

And there are plenty of jobs you can't - dentist in the middle of a filling, driving examiner in the middle of someone's test, crane driver up in the air etc etc. I'd never leave a class of 30 to go to the loo - it's against my statutory duty to leave students unattended.

I'd agree in principle that they should be able to go - but the domino effect of the next 10 asking means it's not possible!

I don’t think your second paragraph is relevant.

Teachers and students are not the same. Teachers have additional “rights” within a school, and obviously additional responsibilities that students don’t have. No one thinks they should be treated the same, including (or even especially) teachers! But when the toilet issue is discussed, suddenly the difference is brought up.

I think 99% of reasonable adults would be furious there was such a festering discipline and safeguarding problem at the school that students can’t use the toilet without being beaten, rather that their child was allowed to use the toilet when they needed it.

If you were sick to your stomach and actually about to soil yourself, you would leave the room regardless of consequences rather than have an accident in front of students.

I've puked in a bin outside the door before now. I've been in front of management once for leaving the room. Full on verbal warning.

GREAT education system.

I respect your opinion and of course we aren't the same. The point I am making is that we all have to respect that there is a time we can go to the loo and times we can't go, both teachers AND students. I wish you could see the disruption it causes as 1 student after another asks to go to the loo once you have let the first one go! It's purely practical, it really is!

It’s an amazing education for everyone involved, and I can’t imagine why a single teacher or student wouldn’t be enjoying themselves at school.

honestly, I think soiling yourself is at a different level of embarrassment even than vomiting. If I had to vomit I would do what you did. But the other thing…no.

Shame all school trips will be out of the question now. Poor kids missing out on what was always good fun.

It’s absolutely a human right, the school have got a hard job though due to so many issues that arise through use out of break times. It’s easy to say but they should be allowed, it just doesn’t occur to a lot of us that it’s not that simple. My kids school refurbished the toilets which got trashed during lesson time. The cost was the toilets out of action for ages and nearly £50k of damage which meant less toilets for the kids to use. There were instances of self harm, kids did it then to release tension. 2-3 meeting from
different lessons wasn’t noticed and they were found doing dangerous TikTok’s. Quite honestly don’t know how they are expected to keep up with it all, we demand a lot. You can’t adequately keep a child safe with this sort of stuff but at the same time they do need to use the toilet.

Toilets are a truly difficult situation in high schools. Firstly as a high school teacher I can tell you that I am the adult that can’t go to the toilet whenever I want to! I have worked in schools for over 10 years and never left a lesson to go to the toilet. Wasn’t always easy (especially later on in pregnancies) but for safe guarding I can’t just disappear.
The issues are:

1. Once you let one go, they all want to go and then If you say no they spend the rest of the lesson complaining how unfair you are. Usually resulting in you having to remove pupils and give them detentions.
2. Some absolute abuse it and disappear for a walk or to hang out in the toilets ALL THE TIME. Missing loads of learning.
3. Senior leaders record if you send pupils to the toilet and if it becomes a pattern or you send more than one a lesson they will come and ‘have a word’ with the member of staff.

I have been picked up many times for sending pupils to the toilets, and I can’t do with the aggravation this year so I will be going for a blanket NO unless they have a toilet pass or look like they may have an accident in the room.

They are allowed to go in transition in our school but we don’t have a break time, only lunch. I feel bad but I also understand the problems it causes for the school and me personally. Hopefully pupils will remember to go when they can.

Also make sure you push to get that toilet pass sorted ASAP

I puked in a bin inside the classroom 😂🤦🏼‍♀️

Ooooo in front of a class? That is mortifying.

I hated this when I was at school! I was a straight A student, never been in trouble in my life and the one time in 5 years I was brave enough to ask to go I was told no! I was on my period and it went through my trousers and all over the chair! Thankfully they were black trousers and it was my last lesson of the day so I could run home.

My DD has IBD so had a time out pass plus access to disabled toilets. Her school didn't issue specific toilet passes to save kids embarrassment. Great idea and can also be used by anxious children.

Her previous school used toilet passes and told old her she could use the disabled toilets if she needed to go during break or lunch as there were always long queues during those time.

She would constantly be challenged and once had a teacher banging on the disabled toilet door ordering her to come out because someone with "an actual disability" needed to use it. She was mortified.

I transferred her out of that school because of their lack of pastoral care.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.