Accused of trespassing for helping a child

[tatt]

anyone know if there is more to this story or is it health & safety gone mad again? health&safety

Feenie my argument is still with the" don't touch don't ever get involved mob."

Well, siding with clear loons won't help yur case much, I wouldn't have thought.

I'm not sure trespass exists as a crime anymore does it? I thought it had to include criminal damage?

You definitely can't come onto school premises and start accosting children.

Feenie the mother of the boy was not there and the school are bound to give their version, I suggest the truth lies halfway between, you have decided the woman was a loon!

The woman doesn't have a child at the school, yet the police have spoken to her regarding 3 incidents on their premises!

Loon.

i have to say i had her down as a loon the first time i read it as well.

and anyone reading the article (even in the dm) should be aware that the boy wasn't stuck at all, he climbed the tree to hide and was refusing to come down at the end of break time.

i'd have left him there as well.

and watched. no way would i have started trying to get him down - recipe for disaster. ask him if he's stuck. ask him to come down. then back off.

i suspect he saw the loon woman coming along the road and decided he was bored and would like to come down after all. at which point the school staff, nutcase passer-by and boy all converged and she started accusing them of negligence and shouting.

i would have called the police as well i think, particularly if she was being verbally or physically aggressive.

interesting that she's supposed to have accessed the school grounds inappropriately before though... did not get that from the dm lol.

i'd def have been calling the police in that situation.

Truth half way in between I suspect, I dont believe everything I read on MNet, newspapers or on the school newsletter.But I am more concerned with the "wait and see" philosophy he was 5 FFS.

I think you should apologise for your earlier comment, bernadette. It was very offensive.

so you think they should have climbed up the tree and tried to wrestle an unwilling 5yo down? there's h&s for you. accident waiting to happen. and probably why they've got the 'no intervention' rule in the first place.

I won't apologise I am afraid Feenie because everytime we have these sorts of threads SOME Teachers pile in with the "we are always right and everyone else = a loon or a liar" There are always 2 sides and as one of the more enlightened Mnetters who is also a Teacher has stated. We are not infallible, we have been encouraged to distrust parents in some respects, Head Teachers are also not infallible. There are more genuinely great teachers than there are bad but they are all constrained by the same confusing and sometimes plainly daft rules!

Your argument doesn't warrant the insult, which was in very poor taste.

@ Feenie definitely no insult, define insult
please. I said that the Teachers who posted (so vociferously) in the "pile on" were skating on thin ice in their arguments. How else would you like it termed "driving close to the edge", "walking a tight rope" etc etc defo not an insult in my book, so can't apologise, I am not in your class you know. When you add a little more balance to your debates on these issues I will give you the respect of my truly favourite teachers at School who were Gods in my eyes>

Sorry, where was the insult? bernadette simply cited a recent relevant case.

The school's accusations against the woman are somewhat weakened if they did, as all the reports and the school website suggest, allow her to help the boy down from the tree before they said anything.

It is just so daft that such a simple case ended at the police and the newspapers!

thanks nighby I always apologise on Mnet if I wrong someone but this does not warrant one. I am trying to persuade Feenie that the truth CAN lie halfway in the middle and you are spot on about involving The Police.

i have known a situation where a primary school child has refused to go in after break and has hidden in a bush within sight of the classroom. what action? should the child get the teacher's full attention to coax or threaten him into school, to the detriment of the other 29 children who she should be teaching? should she get the head involved, or phone the mother to come and deal with the situation? or simply ignore the poor behaviour (as we are all told by supernanny et al)and wait for the child to become bored at the lack of attention and come back in - which worked within 10 minutes in this case. had the child been putting himself in any danger, or had a stranger wandered into school grounds to talk to the child, the teacher would have acted.

reading the letters on the schools site, what reason is there not to totally beleive the headteachers version? a trusted professional who deals with staff children and parents every day, over some random woman we know nothing about other than she did something most of us would never dream of doing and then got all verbally abusive. if you had genuinely thouight you were acting in the childs interests and had been misunderstood, surely it's best to remain polite and apologetic, and WHY leave by climbing back over the locked gate?? - that alone spells LOON to me!

nighbynight The headteacher's letter states that he had 'exited' the tree, as does the boy's mother's statement. The boy's mother called the police, presumably after speaking to her son, and the woman herself involved the newspapers - after she received a letter from the Education Authority's legal department banning her from the school's premises.

Bernadette, you insist that the school could be lying - but I doubt a five year old boy could also be persuaded to lie to his mother to save the school's skin.

Teachers on here referred to health and safety not as 'a net to hide in' (this alone I find offensive) but out of concern for both the child's wellbeing and the adults involved.

To refer to another case where a child died as the result of a teacher's negligence is distasteful in the extreme.

LOL at this comment on the DM link

especially the bit about the 'gold plated parking area for staff'

I know a primary school where there are painted lines on the ground showing parents which way to to walkin into and out of the school, a gold plated parking area or teacher's cars, constant appeals to raise money for obscure pats of the world and projects to bring 'spare' clothes to school to be sent..'somewhere!' My grandchildren tell me with awe in their voices not to walk across the staff car park becuse I 'will get into trouble'! When will we take these engineered rules apart?

• Michael McGee, Rochester, Kent, 25/3/2010 08:36

according to the school the child was not stuck up the tree, merely sitting/swinging in a low branch. And although the womans intentions may have been genuine, that she thought he needed helping down, he was stood on the path when she approached him. what child would not be freaked out by a stranger climbing in to school and coming to talk to them?

Brilliant- there are quotes from people saying ' Only in today's loony left broken Britain - for God's sake, someone get a grip before it's too late and every last Briton is on sedation...............

• Chris - Plain chocolate-eating, UK tax-paying, ex-pat, Limassol, Cyprus, 24/3/2010 11:25

Outstanding. A true DM reader if ever I saw one.

Head teachers ALWAYS tell the truth of course!
And random members of the public are loons.I dont know the woman or the headteacher and I suspect nobody else does on this post. I go back to my original argument re: the daft health and safety rules and teachers ARE not infallible harsh but true!

I love that the comments thread even descends into immigrant bashing, typically.

'So how come the police refuse completely to intervene in the trespassing by immigrants in homeowners' sheds and gardens in Peterborough as (when immigrants are involved) trespass is not a criminal matter.'

Do people actually think the DM is a serious publication? Or is it a big giant injoke and everyone is just winding me up?

There are even baying cries for the school to be closed down completely!

no,headteachers do not always tell the truth, and I have met a few crap ones in my career i can tell you! but by risking lying she has a hell of a lot more to lose than some unknown and yes IMO unhinged woman(exit the school by climbing over locked gate having been talking to staff? wtf is going on in her head then?) who immediately runs to the papers for her 5 minutes of fame

reminds me of the saga with the woman and first buses in bristol, who it transpires was not thrown off bus for BFing

FALAFEL - how sad....you know, i have the uneasy feeling that the media circus around this might well lead to calls for the head to resign etc like in the ridiculous saga of the sheep at lydd school sent to market. why do 100s of people uninvolved feel they have the right to call for things like this? the morons won, lydds head left. either that or the poor woman will end up off sick with stress over it all.