'School bullied my son for telling truth about drugs’
The only GCSE pupil honest enough to admit drug-taking during an investigation at a top private school was forced out earlier this year — while the 34 boys who stayed silent were allowed to remain.
Today, Julian Dodds, the father of the 16-year-old, has gone public to highlight what he says is gross injustice because of the widespread variation in how private schools handle drug-taking among pupils; he says the practice is at “epidemic levels” among teenagers. The case comes more than two decades after the same school, Whitgift, in Croydon, south London, was criticised for taking a similarly hardline approach, expelling 10 pupils for smoking cannabis.
Whitgift told the 16-year old he would have to leave in February, just a few months before he was due to take nine GCSEs. The teenager was one of 35 boys interrogated by teachers in the school for several hours after a tip-off by other pupils about an alleged drugs problem. Parents whose sons refused to take a drugs test were also called in and quizzed during what was called “Operation Swoop”.
The boys were interrogated in five different rooms and told that “things would go better for them if they wrote an admission statement of what substances they had ever taken”.
Dodds’s son said he had tried marijuana and “some pills”, though not on the school premises.
“My boy was the only one to tell the truth and for that he got kicked out of school,” said his father. “Why are schools allowed to bully kids in this way when drug use is widespread among teenagers, particularly at private schools? Some boys at the school have a bingo card on which they tick off all the drugs they have tried.
“The Whitgift boys get targeted by drug dealers on the train they travel to school on. This is the issue: how do you tackle drug use among teenagers when police have largely given up?”
The Dodds family were given a choice between withdrawing their son or attending a meeting with the headmaster, Chris Ramsey, at which they were warned that their son could be expelled. They chose to withdraw him.
The school, to which they had paid about £90,000 for five years’ tuition, said he could come back there to sit his exams if no other school place could be found for him. He revised at home with the help of private tutors, and returned to Whitgift to sit his exams.
Whitgift said: “After long consideration, a student was asked to leave the school four months ago after an investigation . . . pupils and parents are aware that the school cannot tolerate involvement with drugs and the safety of all our pupils is our primary concern. The presence of drugs [among] young people is a societal issue that can ruin lives.”