STABBING AND ONLY EXCLUDED! WHY????

[bossboggle]

My son attends the local senior school where a pupil was stabbed in the back by another pupil last week during a lesson!! Glad to say the pupil stabbed recovered well given the circumstances. THE CHILD WHO DID THE STABBING HAS ONLY BEEN EXCLUDED FOR ONE WEEK!! I find this situation ridiculous because if it was two adults in this situation, one of them would have now been on remand!! The children in the school no longer want this child in the same building and quite frankly I totally agree with them!! Anyone know what the next move will be by the school and how do we get this child permanently removed from the school environment!! What about the safety of all of the other children?? Would you want to enter your work place knowing that someone had done that to someone else and you still had to work with them? What do we as parents have to do to protect our children and I thought that the school had a duty to do that when my child is there? Or am I missing something???!! Anyone any advice!!

Stabbing someone in the back with a compass sounds pretty bad to me.

It does, but let's wait for all the evidence and explanations before shrieking and flailing shall we?

The school has a duty to its pupils and as such needs to take appropriate action. As others have quite correctly said we do not know all the circumstances of the incident, however for there to be police involvement it is obviously quite serious.
The school should and must work in parallel with any police investigation but has to come to their own conclusions about what they do about the incident. They should not be washing their hands of it if the police are taking it further, that is simply not how the guidance on exclusions is written.
It is entirely possible that the headteacher has given a weeks fixed term exclusion to allow the school and the police to make further enquiries. As long as the head teacher has in their exclusion letter said that this is a fixed term exclusion to allow further investigation to take place and it might lead to permanent exclusion, then this is actually good practice.
So the question for bossboogle is do you know whether this was the only punishment and they are back in school or are they still in the week of exclusion?
Personally as a parent I would be livid if this was a deliberate attack, rather than messing around and would be expecting a permananet exclusion. As a member of independant appeal panels on exclusions I also would expect that to be the outcome, the guidance is very clear that a violent attack is justification for permanent exclusion and always has been!

We're not going to get all the evidence, and I'm nit shrieking or wailing.

Just disagreeing with the assertion that stabbing someone in the back with a sharp metal object doesn't sound "that bad".

It sounds very bad. What the story behind it might be, I have no clue, how the school should deal with it is impossible to say with so little information.

But minimising violent attacks on pupils that require police involvement is bizarre.

There is a weird acceptance in some quarters that schools are necessarily violent and that teachers and pupils alike must just put up with it because nothing can be done about it.

Also imporatant to remember is that although all children are entitled to an education, that education does not have to take place in a mainstream school. Also the right to an education extends (at least in theory) to education in a safe environment free of the risk of serious physical attack.

The rights of violent children to be in school are in direct conflict with those of other children to go to school without fear if violence.

Um, you said it didn't seem that bad to you yet.

I don't believe in automatic permanent exclusion. As you say, there are plenty if reasons why the school might not want to take that course of action.

I too have seen kids who've been bullied suddenly on the receiving end of bullying allegations when it all gets too much for them and they finally hit back. And the fact that apparently a number of the children no longer want to be in school with this child makes me wonder if the pupil who did this was something of a social outcast.

But it is bad for kids in school to be stabbing one another with metal implements. You can deal with it judiciously without minimising its significance.

The school may well take that course of action eventually but at the moment the incident seems serious enough to involve the police. The school will be letting the police deal with it in the first instance.

Any investigation the school does may undermine the police investigation. Schools often allow witnesses to collude with each other before taking any accounts and this hinders enquiries.

Let the police deal with it first.

A friend was stabbed with a compass at my brothers (all boys independent !) school and suffered a punctured lung. The boy was excluded for a while but this was not taken up by the police because the boy's parents did not want to press charges.
The school dealt with it internally and the situation was resolved effectively by the school.

Might be that the child is on a 5-day exclusion during which a meeting of the governors will be called if the incident was serious enough to warrant permanent exclusion or a managed moved.

As the OP would give the full details I can only guess.

Just an update people: the police consider it serious enough to press charges and the said pupil wasn't allowed back into the school. Everyone's views were taken into account and the senior team at the school came to the conclusion to exclude the child permenantly from school.