School toilets

[Sweetheart1990]

School toilets!
Son text me to say he had walked out of lesson after being refused permission to go to the toilet, he had finished all his work. I have always told him to do this if he is desperate but he never actually has before.
He has been put in isolation.
I'm angry as I really believe that students should be allowed to go when they need to and he had completed all tasks so was just say in the classroom anyway.
What does everyone else think?

This is a huge part of the problem - I don't know about you personally, but many want to categorise people into two groups: elderly/disabled/useless/unimportant or young/healthy/normal/worthy of consideration.

People are people - and all of them are inherently worthy of respect and dignity, and all of them have human needs: some universal and some that are specific to them personally.

Even now you're asking what medical issues he has before you consider him worthy of this respect. Why should people with disabilities and medical conditions be pressured to share this private information with all and sundry, often just so they can be judged either as 'worthy' or told they are lying/exaggerating/imagining it/thinking they are special or whatever.

He's a human being who needs to use the toilet - and he's given no signs whatsoever that he's claiming this falsely in order to be able to go and mess around. Why is that not enough?

Why should he not have to declare a medical reason for urgently needing the toilet to the school in order that he could then have a pass to go? Errrr… 🤔 but yes you are right - it doesn’t have to be declared on this thread. Teens are known for not popping out of lessons every 5 mins given the chance and schools obviously don’t know anything about child behaviour given these ridiculous rules they put in place. Gosh I’ve completely changed my mind now 😂

I can’t believe people are still so against a child needing the toilet. a basic human right.

school rules are school rules, I’m all for them, but if a child has asked 3 times to go it shows he’s desperate.

if he was to piss himself in class you would all be so against the school for not letting him go.
it’s mortifying for those it’s happened to.

you all must have really good pelvic floors to hold in a desperate wee

Of all the school-related threads on here, this might have attracted the most bizarre people. You’ve manage managed to construct a world in your head where the choice is between going to the toilet and being a part of the school community. I hope you are just an armchair authoritarian and not an actual teacher.

my advice: calm down and get ahold of yourself. If your sense of order is shattered by a good student going to the toilet in an emergency, then it wasn’t doing you any good to begin with.

No.
It's you and your reaction.
You've blown it up, you.
The school isn't posting on Mumsnet looking to whip up anti parent sentiment.

No, they wouldn’t be against the school if he had an accident. For people that obsessed with order and obedience, the resulting bullying is just the students culling the herd of someone who can’t conform. Bullying is a feature of authoritarian systems, not a bug. At best, the abject humiliation and ostracism of one student is an acceptable price to pay for absolute order.

If they are teachers, which I doubt, they are very likely bullies in their own classrooms.

Reading their posts, it looks like you’re arguing with someone who is mentally unwell. I would leave it.

Ironically, if a school actually kept such a person in a position of responsibility, that would itself justify your child carrying a cellphone, because it would call into question call their competence to look after his wellbeing.

This is embarrassing now. Nobody would write "there were 19 minutes and 12 seconds of lesson left and he was gone for five minutes and three seconds." As I think you know full well.

How disrespectful to have to perform a perfectly normal bodily function.

Where I live there is an ongoing saga about this. The toilets are locked with a padlocked gate during lesson time, and only opened on break time. Meaning massive queues and very little privacy because there is pressure to get in and out as quickly as possible. Parents are up in arms and the school are not budging.

Some teenage girls have had period related incidents and been forced to sit in it and wait. Kids have wet themselves and then walked out of school, waiting so long in a queue only to have the bell go off and be ushered away and back to lesson. Its barbaric if you ask me.

There was even a girl who had the most horrific battle with ovarian cancer, when she recovered and returned she wasnt given any exemptions to use the toilet in lesson time despite the after effects of chemo and radiation being completely unpredictable.

How it hasnt ended up on the news I dont know

Maybe you should name and shame here and someone will contact the Mail.

DD2 secondary it did end up in local paper but school claimed they were always accessible in break times - which wasn't kids experinces - and medical passes were avaliable though not always as helpful as hoped. So blunted effect and looked like it was whiny parents and kids TBH.

I don't think there were such dramatic issues as you describe - though think DD2 got into bad holding habits - but truancy rates were high anyway and teen girls did go up..

Most teachers more sympathetic than management where they could be - they had winters with all windows open and most teachers had let them keep coats on - though head took to doing spot checks and insisting kdis couldn't ware coats - and 12 months were they made eating in school near impossible - so it was a pattern of behavior.

I really hope you're not a teacher yourself.

What you’re describing is simply abuse and bullying, similar to what got the Mossbourne schools in trouble recently. This school needs to be named and shamed in the media, and local mp should get involved as well.

The local paper did a bit on it in which the school denied all knowledge. The local GP put out a statement that said they were getting a lot of calls about it from parents asking them to intervene. From what students said the teachers didn't pay any attention to medical forms and refused them anyway.

One of the teens took a photo of the locked toilet gates which did the rounds on social media but seems to have disappeared. The school itself is in turmoil, the teachers have absolutely no control and this is one of the extreme stories to come out of there.

I know the girl who was seriously ill opted to be home schooled after all of this.

I would, and have done, during a bad bout of diarrhoea. What’s the alternative? Shit yourself in a meeting? Anyone, adult or child, should be able to go to the toilet whenever they want without anyone judging them for being rude. You have no idea what’s going on with their bladder or bowels

OP, did you speak with the school about this, and get the teacher's side of the incident? Are you absolutely sure that your son simply politely excused himself and left the room, or was he rude/offensive? Exclusion seems a draconian response. Kids don't always tell the unadorned truth, you know. Even yours.

Have not spoken to the teacher yet as I'm waiting for them to contact me when convenient for them (I appreciate they are busy) but I've spoken to my son several times and he has assured me he was not rude and also does have a lot of respect for the teacher and a good relationship. He was sent to isolation but then sent back to his lessons, I've received a text today to say he's got detention as it's classes as truancy. Without speaking to the isolation staff I can only assume that they have spoken to the teacher and she has told them how it was so they have been less harsh on him, as when he was first spoken to about it (before the teacher had been asked) they were threatening allsorts

Yesterday a child in our school was desperate for the toilet and was allowed to go. They went in every single cubicle, locked it and crawled out!!!
Your child walks out of class and the fire alarm goes off. No one knows where they are! I’ve had that happen to me.

Sometimes, in a shopping centre or other public place, someone makes a terrible mess of a toilet cubicle. Should all shoppers then be prevented from accessing the toilets because of the actions of an annoying minority? Surely, if it’s acceptable to do this to children in a place they have to spend five days a week, it must be acceptable for everyone?

I think people are naive as to what goes on in school toilets.

We're a "good" behaviour wise school and it's still a nightmare with kids trying to meet up during lessons, vaping, filming each other, having sex, self harming, assaulting other pupils etc etc
They'll leave lessons and not come back, meaning staff are sent across site to find them.
They wander as slowly as possible, coming back and another kids suddenly wants to leave and it all just disrupts learning and more often than not causes issues.

We went through a phase earlier this school year of children destroying the toilets during lessons. I'm talking things like ripping the doors off, unscrewing the locks, shoving things down the toilets to block them, smearing the walls with excrement, etc. We reached a point several times that we almost had to close the entire school because good, innocent children were sobbing buckets because they couldn't go to the toilet at break time due to them all being put out of order during period 1 and 2. Of course we always punish the ones who did it, but that doesn't change the fact that those toilets are now out of order and can't be used by the sweet children who did nothing wrong.

The only way we could stop this was to have a blanket ban on going to the toilet in lessons. We're told to use our discretion but children are very good at pretending to be desperate when they're not, and it's often impossible to discern who is desperate and who isn't.

One time a few months ago I let a girl go who had started her period unexpectedly. Three boys who had been banned by their head of year from going to the toilet in lessons because of their abusive behaviour when they left went absolutely ballistic at me. For a full thirty minutes they screamed abuse at me, they called me a slut, a whore, a c, a b*, and I couldn't reach my lesson because they were screaming so loud without stopping. I sent for on call but on call couldn't come because a girl who had been let out of her lesson to go to the toilet had locked herself into a cubicle and was self harming, so they were trying to break into her cubicle. Then when the boys screaming abuse at me realised it wasn't getting them out, I had to remove the girl (with her consent) because they were abusing the girl instead.

It is so, so easy to judge schools for having toilet bans, but you have no idea what we're dealing with and how fast things can spiral out of control.

So what you really have are school “leaders” who have allowed behavior to degenerate to the point where the school is a dangerous environment for students and teachers, one symptom of which is misbehavior involving the toilets. That seems to be the real problem. The students screaming abuse at you would seem to warrant a lengthy, if not permanent exclusion, as does the vandalism of school facilities. I’m curious to hear what the headteacher did with them.

as far as vandalism, are there not cameras in the corridors that at least show who goes in and out? Putting aside the fact that administration probably knows perfectly well who is doing it but doesn’t have the stones to confront them (or their parents).

None of this, however, justifies a blanket ban on toilets that punishes good students and damage their trust in the school,all for the sake of sparing leadership the trouble of actually doing their jobs, which is to come up with solutions that are not cruel and abusive on their face. Before anyone says “let’s hear them, then!” I would suggest this question be put to the people who are paid to come up with solutions. I would suggest as a starting point, however, looking at the dozens of advanced countries, and the hundreds of schools in the UK, that serve similarly under-resourced (or whatever the term is now) areas, and yet manage to keep toilets open. This won’t happen, of course, because it would require a modicum of actual effort and research on their part; whereas proclaiming that toilets are locked, ties will be so many inches long, and jackets will be worn during heat waves requires none, and leaves the teachers and students to bear all the consequences.