Telford & Wrekin Council Watch
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Latest News
The Dawley Sign and a TAWPA councillors Comments
The Dawley Sign and a TAWPA Councillors Comments
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Telford Housing Report Update
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| Secret records on our children |
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| Written by johnfranklyn | |||||||
| Friday, 09 January 2009 | |||||||
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Secret Records In The Education System
Many of Telford’s pupils are aware that teachers can enter comments on to their log. This log is supposed to be an accurate reflection of issues within the school.
The logs maintained are supposed to record rewards the child receives or incidents they may have been involved in.
Unfortunately, this record keeping is open to abuse by teachers and staff at school with many records not being a fair reflection of an event and is not updated on each incident.
Here is an extract from one such report,
“Two dinner ladies who are very unhappy because they received a whole heap of abuse from xxxxx”
This line makes it appear that child x, was abusive to staff and for no reason. The truth is as follows,
The two dinner ladies were in fact abusive towards a child, then became abusive to a second child. One of the dinner ladies then threatened one of the children with physical harm and said she would “get the child after school”
The Sutherland School then conducted a full investigation after the parents wanted to involve the police. The disciplinary discovered the staff had been abusive and threatening towards children. One of the dinner ladies did admit threatening behaviour to a pupil.
The dinner lady was disciplined and continues to work in the same school.
The unfortunate example here, is, although other young people were involved, this record was only placed on one child’s records and never updated after the event to clear the good name of the child.
Other entries included things like
Bullying
DET
Silliness
REP
With no further explanation.
The school also chose to omit from records a complaint about a teacher keeping a child stood outside a class for over 5 hours, the child only wanted to collect their course work and her form tutor never assisted despite knowing what was happening.
The Shropshire Star is running an article about bullying. This is all to often seen as a pupil on pupil affair and schools often choose to move the victim rather than sort out the bully.
As in this case, the adults were the bullies, investigated and found to be at fault but the blame is officially recorded as being the fault of a single child.
All to often, teachers and staff develop “their favourites” that get away with pretty anything, choosing to record inaccurate events on those they do not like.
Why blame the child?
To me, the answer is simple. The child is a pupil, is not given adequate protection, even under the Children’s Act.
The member of staff, being employed has certain protections and rights under employment legislation therefore, it is easier and potentially cheaper to blame the child, than sort out the member of staff.
A real strategy for bullying has to sought and implemented. All to often children are being rewarded for bad behaviour, getting trips to bowling, theme parks etc. This is not a deterrent, it encourages bad behaviour that then spills from the school into the community. Any strategy has to be effective against teachers and staff as well as the pupil, it is not acceptable to rules for them and better rules for us scenario.
Parents are not aware that they can request a copy of their logs under the FOI and this has led to false records being recorded.. This has recently been completed for the first time in the borough. Telford and Wrekin Council never had a policy in force for this and has had to adopt one pretty sharpish.
I strongly suggest that every parent request a copy of their child’s log from their school and I can assure you that you will be in for a surprise.
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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."Telford Council Watch                |
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