Secondary School Parent Assault

[kelsskool]

Name change as this incident is the talk of our local town which is a small agricultural village where everyone knows of everyone.
There has been an incident in our local secondary school where a mother stormed into the school canteen and verbally abused a school boy.
Apparently the mothers child had been getting bullied by the boy and he text his mum from the school and she stormed in to confront him.
One of the other pupils recorded it and it's gone viral locally and I am really concerned about safety within the school, I don't know this woman but I've can see she's enraged to the point of unhinged, jabbing the young lad with her finger and saying that 'if you want to sort this out then let's go outside' extremely threatening, she was shortly escorted out by four members of staff. I've since heard various concerning aspects of this woman's personality and that of her husband's but the most worrying is that they are both in charge of a local pheasant shoot and have guns!!!!
I have a pupil at this school and although they didn't see the argument I'm concerned about school safety. Would this like have been stopped in a school with adequate safety measures and if so should the school be held accountable for this massive safety breach?

I agree, it's really concerning that a parent can just walk in like that. They should have a buzzer if parents need to access the school during the day, and even then, the parents shouldn't be allowed to walk around the school. Hopefully the school will react but I think you are right to be concerned, OP.

Not getting into the bullying aspect.

Yes I would be very concerned about 2 people being able to walk in unnoticed and gain access to a room full of children and approach them.

Providing that her son is being bullied. It isn't uncommon for bullies to accuse their victims of picking on them.

I think it’s a bit of a reach to start worrying about gun access. The sort of guns you use to shoot game are not the sort used in high school massacres.

I work in a secondary school and no one can get in without a fob or being let in by reception.

Same here. Totally impossible

Well yes security is clearly a risk.

But if this is viral I doubt the powers that he will ignore it.

There's a good chance the bully had a good taste of their medicine and despite all the obvious issues with this I hope it actually has a positive outcome.

Agreed. I remember my Scottish primary getting locked doors in the days/weeks after Dunblane. I've never worked in a school where you don't have to be buzzed in. It is a security breech; the rest is irrelevant.

Agree, very worrying security breach. No way would a parent be able to get into our dining halls. They would have to come to reception and then would be accompanied the whole time they were in the building. Safeguarding fail there.

I'm genuinely surprised. At these 'secure' schools are older kids allowed off the premises at lunch?

Secondary chools are supposed to be secure these days. Ofsted pan them for it if they're not. Happened to a school near me. At my dc's school 6th formers are allowed off site at lunch time, but they have to be buzzed out and back in again.

I suspect the school is obliged to report to the police and SW safeguarding, any kind of adult-on -minor assault on their premises.

If the police charge her and she's convicted of threatening/ assaulting a minor she will then have a criminal record that will cost her her gun license and livelihood.

An incident like this can trigger an Ofsted inspection.

Extraordinary that she was able to just barge in. School security is usually very tight.

Yes that would be my biggest concern & getting to the canteen when there should be teachers about without being stopped. Baffling!

Serious safeguarding issue. Ofsted would automatically put a school into special measures for this. Any secondary school I know has secure gates and nobody can get on site without being buzzed in.

That's a major safeguarding incident if true. School will be shit hot onto it. Safeguarding is the most important aspect of school, above education. It's fundamental and not optional so MASH and police will be dealing with it now.

All the schools I've worked at over the last ten years (supply) have had very stringent security. All access to grounds or building is locked.
Visited are bussed in from main gate and not allowed in main building unless they have an appointment or emergency. My favourite school called the police because the mother of a bully was banging on the gate demanding she was let in because she couldn't reach him on his 'phone so the school must have stolen his phone and locked him away.
He was brought home by the police after threatening the mother of one of his victims at her lace of work.
So. If this mother did indeed scale a fence,bypass the electronic swipe system, AND the receptionist with a gimlet stare and alarm button, then either it's bullshit or the school is fucked.

There’s a woman like this at our old primary school. By the end of the second week of term, she had screamed, swore and was right up in the faces of THREE parents at pick up time.

Her mistake was doing it to me. Unlike the others, I didn’t shout back. I just stood there, quietly, saying nothing, which just seemed to make her angrier, and she was around 8 inches taller than me and twice my weight.

I complained, all the way up, and as a result, she was banned from the playground, and had to collect her child early, from the office, for the rest of that year.

My child’s crime was refusing to play with her child. Never mind the fact that her child had spent the last year terrorising my child, amongst others.

Her child had also sent such disturbing messages to mine via a game that I took photos and reported it to the school, SS and the police, because they strongly suggested she was being abused in multiple ways.

But from the outside, you’d assume it was my child that was the problem. Nope.

This is just not true.

At DD's school the sixth-form lanyards allow them to open the doors to enter/leave the premises. (I must ask whether they've had a lecture on making sure nobody tailgates them...)

I think the biggest problem is that the mother can go into the school canteen unchecked. At my dc's school, there is no way I can go into school ground unless it's open day etc for parents.

Yeah but if someone is a current parent, even a secure school that buzzes parents in and out might have let her in with an excuse or she could even have had an appointment, been escorted by a staff member and just broken away from their escort and walked into the canteen. If someone is determined enough they can get through almost any security or away from a 1:1 escort.

Local school near us is like fort knox with locked gates and buzzers and signing in and out, and yet they still had a tabloid journo who lied her way in at drop off, took her lanyard off, hid in the loos and then wrote an article about the poor security at the school and how she could have taken pictures of the kids (there were kids of celebs there).

Basically, we don't know the circumstances of how the mum got into the canteen is what I'm saying, and nobody on this thread can answer it. Obviously that mum should be banned from the school premises permanently and if it was an independent school they might even ask the child to leave as well, on the basis the relationship of trust with the parents had broken down/breach of the parent contract - not sure if state schools have a similar power to do this on the basis of parent rather than pupil behaviour.

One would hope in any case, the school will fully review the incident, whether its procedures are adequate and whether they were followed, and see if anything could have been done to prevent it, balancing the practicalities of security measures with being a school with parents that will sometimes need to come on site.

I don't know how many schools keep all the entrances locked until staff are on duty at them in the morning. I know ours doesn't lock them at the end of the day - I was able to walk in at 4pm and walk out with a musical instrument - it was my DC's but hardly anybody saw me, and nobody challenged me.

Ours are on automatic locking, like every school i have been into in recent years. There are brief periods at the start and end of the school day when they are unlocked for everyone, staff are on duty at those times, otherwise you need a swipe card to get in. Every entrance to the outside of school has these locks, there are plenty more inside that operate at specific times. Some private schools may still be well behind the curve on this but as mentioned upthread, for a state school, failure to have a secure site would be a massive ofsted red flag.

This is concerning. The security of most schools depends on adults understanding the unwritten social codes that a) you enter via reception and b) you don’t just walk into a school and confront a random child.

As you can see that’s all a facade and kids aren’t safe as soon as an adult doesn’t feel like following the rules.

Report this to Ofsted as a major safeguarding issue and put pressure on the school to lock their doors because now one person has done it others might whenever they want to make drama (social contagion).

That poor kid.