These smothering, myopic mummies DON’T know best

MISS SHARPLES, she was called. She already seemed as old as a fossil by the time I met her, wore tweed skirts and stout brown shoes, and had a crinkly face, like a walnut. She always, always smelled of Woodbines. The fag I mean, not the flower. She taught history without any idea that she would become part of ours.

For Miss Sharples was the stern one we still remember. Not a terrifying Miss Trunchbull who roasted children’s backsides with a belt or birch, but a teacher whose natural authority, as understood by her, and her pupils – and by extension our parents – was complete.

I was reflecting on this because the authority of another teacher respected by generations of pupils has taken a clattering in court this past week.

Jane Edmands, headmistress of Burton Pidsea Primary School near Hull, was accused of common assault after leading a weeping three-year-old boy who wanted to stay with his mother from cloakroom to classroom.

Hands up class, who’s ever done the ‘Be firm, don’t fuss’ routine on a howling child to get them to do something they don’t want to do, but have to. Right. All of you. Me too. Since for ever.

Here the mother said the head grabbed her son’s wrist and dragged him away, his feet almost off the floor, making him cry hysterically. She called the council which, given that it was a safeguarding issue, called in the police. They prosecuted, her barrister tells me, without taking any pre-charge advice from the Crown Prosecution Service.

It was left to Hull magistrates last Wednesday to clear Mrs Edmands of using excessive force.

They took less than 30 minutes after hearing ‘inconsistent and uncertain’ evidence against her, with the mother admitting she hadn’t actually seen Mrs Edmands manhandle her son – she’d ‘assumed’ it had happened because his jumper was tugged up. Not so much a legal case as trial by partisan parenting opinion, then.

Although she has been cleared, Mrs Edmands remains suspended and will do until East Riding of Yorkshire Council concludes the professional standards inquiry it had no choice but to launch.

No 30-year career tarnished like this can ever be buffed to its previous polish. All the joyous little things which are the calendar of the school year – the assemblies, egg-and-spoon races and nativity plays – will now always come second to the day she was wrongly accused of common assault on a small child. She will never escape the ignominy.

Stop just for a second and imagine you were her, a woman believed to have hurt a three-year-old so badly the police had to be called. Now imagine that you were a teacher – and that helping schoolchildren be the best that they can be was your vocation, your livelihood, your pleasure and your pride.

ALL mums are enthusiastic advocates for their children, Mother Nature sees to that. But if we vest authority in teachers, then we must respect them. Yes, there are some bad ones but they are mostly a beloved species for a reason, which is that many of them are good and some are wonderful.

On the other side of the classroom door, we mums can be myopic in comparison. I am not the first to say that our understanding of boundaries and discipline and ‘the stuff that just has to be done to ensure you grow up properly’ (like dealing with very normal separation anxiety) has been bent out of shape by the need to have children who like us, rather than respect us.

That’s how when someone in authority tells a screaming three-year-old, ‘actually I’m the one in charge here’, they can find themselves accused of common assault. Love and kindness and time are the cornerstones of raising children but you can’t just nourish, you have to rule too. Both at home and in class.

The age of the dunce’s cap is long gone. Let’s offer one anyway to the mum who has done so much damage to Mrs Edmands, and by extension, the wider teaching profession.

Her wailing three-year-old would have dried his eyes and been building the Millennium Falcon out of an egg carton and foil with his chums before she’d even got back out into the playground.

Still, you’re never too old to learn, eh?