A UK newspaper reports that a student hid in a bathroom for three days to escape his tormentors, and that this was only discovered when the school reported him to his parents for truancy. That this happened, that it took the school three days to act and that the school's response was to text the parents makes the school the aggressor and more culpable than the victim's attackers.
Cotham School is an academy, a G6 - 11 UK public school which is essentially the same as a US charter school, with about 1500 students. As an academy, the school is largely responsible for its own policies and procedures, within legal requirements on health and safety etc, and within its funding agreement with the UK government. In this case, the bullying, the student's hiding, the student's unnoticed absence and the text to parents accusing the student of truancy are fully within the school's purview.
Bullying is a term often misused. Children are unfriendly, unpleasant and mean to one another all the time. This, rudeness and bad behavior are improper and likely unacceptable, but they are not bullying. Bullying is sustained, occurs over time and is intentional. Bullying is about power which is why unseen, psychological, bullying is such a threat.
Bullying can only occur within a culture which allows, excuses or even implicitly or otherwise endorses it. The two things which allow bullying to occur and to thrive in a school are its values and a distance between students and staff. Both of these come from the top, ie from the Board and the Director, through the staff and through the day-to-day life of the school.
If a winner in a sports competition or a class quiz is allowed to taunt a loser, or even the second placeholder, bullying is inevitable. If Physics is seen as having a higher status than shop, then bullying is inevitable. If a student speaking with a teacher is seen as disloyal to his/her classmates, bullying is inevitable. All of these are examples of school culture, and to me examples of child endangerment.
Student lateness to and absence from any class should always immediately be investigated and administrative time and responsibility should be assigned to this. This is because an administrator can take a big-picture, schoolwide perspective that a teacher cannot, and s/he can see patterns and other factors. Also, because s/he has access to the time and tools needed.
Pre-arranged lateness or absence, for example a medical appointment, can be easily approved and logged into a register or database where it can be checked. Ideally, the teacher(s) should be advised as this could affect lesson and activity planning. The purpose need not be given, just that it has been "approved". A student late from an earlier class or because of speaking with another teacher need only a note, "Jo was with me. Date, time, signature", which the student hands to the next teacher when s/he arrives.
Non-pre-arranged lateness or absence should be followed up immediately, so appropriate policies and procedures are necessary. I once taught at a school with an horrific bullying problem, inter alia, and student lateness or absence was never pursued. At any time of the school day, students could be seen roaming around. I once had a "meeting" with the director because I had not given a female student a bathroom pass. I explained I had heard her tell her friends she had arranged an assignation with her boyfriend; the next day, the director was waiting in the auditorium and caught them both as predicted. She no longer received bathroom passes from my class, although I would still encounter her out and about at other times.
(In the same school, one of the janitors was hospitalized because of an insecticide "bomb" left in a bathroom by a student, and on another occasion, something placed in a toilet exploded and blew it to pieces. In both cases, so many students in that block were out of class at the time that the school was unable to identify the culprits. Officially and unofficially sanctioned hazing events occurred regularly, and I remember a teaching colleague telling me how important this was to character formation and how it had happened when he was a student at the same school.)
Teachers should report lateness or absence as soon as practicable. In a small school, the administrator can visit every classroom just after the beginning of the school day to create the list of those not in class, and all late arrivals must pass by his/her office to explain and to be recorded as now present. Unexplained absences can then be followed up immediately and directly. In a large school, other systems can be used like electronic reporting, a student runner who collects attendance registers from every class, or even one of the support staff circulating several times a day.
In my own life as a school director, I remember several cases where students had not come in and parents had not told us, however after our calling them at home or especially at work to check on their child(ren), we were advised from then on and in almost every case, we were thanked for our concern. To make it easy for parents, we accepted texts, messages, calls and emails, all of which were checked before 7.00am, again at perhaps 7.30am, and then regularly once the office opened at 8.00am.
At Cotham School, this was apparently not done in the first class the boy missed, nor even the first day. The school did not act until the third day and this is inexcusable. To me, this is child neglect.
The third fault here was contacting the parents by text. This is both cavalier and desultory and shows a lack of relationship with the parents, a lack of care and concern for the family and a lack of care and concern for the boy. There should have been a phonecall to the parents and a genuine and personal discussion of the situation, and at the very least trust between both parties established.
I have always had an escalating system of "three" with multiple contacts for each : the primary caregiver, often the mother, the secondary contact and then a third which in my experience was a grand-parent or neighbor who was also authorized to collect the child if s/he was not permitted to go home alone. I remember one case where the mother, out of town, thought that the father was coming for their son, however he was also out of town and had not seen the message from his ex-wife, and the grandmother lived in another city. She was able to contact an uncle, and to arrange for a pick-up authorization, so the child was collected. Without this, state law required us to call CPS and to report the child as "abandoned"!
I remember another time when the father left before sunbreak every morning for work, and on this day, the mother also left early, trusting her son to get himself to school. He did not arrive for registration at 7.50am, we called the mother around 8.15am (he was prioritized as he had not missed registration before and we knew the mother was at a seminar) and he was in class by 9.00am. He might have turned up anyway, he might have stayed at home all day or he might have done a Ferris Bueller; in any case, he was safe and sound at school and this did not happen again.
An important side-effect of our proactiveness in the schools were I implemented this procedure was that parents discussed it with other parents. We were universally supported on this, all our calls to home and work on any topic were taken, and we had considerably fewer problems with lateness and absence than other schools in the area or our school associations.
What happened to the boy at Cotham School was dreadful, and that he felt he had to hide in a bathroom was the only avenue open to him breaks my heart. However, I think that the true villains in this tale are the school principal and the Board for not ensuring that the school has an appropriate culture and policies and procedures.
**Questions and comments below**
Further reading
https://teaching-abc.blogspot.com/2020/10/something-in-this-responses-tone-does.html
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