Ban on heads who bolted special needs pupils in ‘calm rooms’
TWO ex-senior teachers locked pupils with special educational needs in bolted “calming rooms”, a report has revealed.
Odran Doran and Simon Black have been banned from teaching indefinitely after a probe into their leadership at The Bridge School in Ipswich where they were head and deputy respectively.
Many SEN pupils there, aged from four to 16, were non-verbal or pre-verbal.
Officials visiting the unit found rooms with bolts and Mr Doran they would be used “to contain children if they were being aggressive and presenting a danger to themselves or others”.
A bolted, padded room known as the “soft play” space had been used with other “calming rooms” since 2015.
Mr Doran, 66, told the Teaching Regulation Agency they were “intentionally bleak” to de-escalate a pupil’s behaviour. The report also found Mr Black, 62, was involved in “pushing and rolling” a pupil from a hallway into a calming room before locking them in. He said he was responding to a call for help as the pupil was in a “heightened state”.
A misconduct panel found he engaged in inappropriate and unprofessional behaviour while Mr Doran was “unprofessional and aggressive” in restricting pupils’ movements with locks.
Mr Doran was head and associate head teacher from 1988 until he retired and was replaced by Mr Black in 2017.
David Oatley, decision maker on behalf of the Secretary of State, said of Mr Doran: “The lack of insight and remorse means that there is some risk of the repetition of this behaviour and this puts at risk the future wellbeing of pupils.”