Atrocities put us all sssooo centre stage

Yo bro, sis! It’s Harrio Belli here, your snuggly social media sage with a few dope tips on how to publicly emote after a terrorist outrage.

Right, first turn your brain off and switch yourself on to ‘heart’ setting. Your words will now be funnelled through your body and transmitted via your rear end.

Before you start typing, check to ensure that the ‘I’ key on your device is fully operational as you’ll be using it a lot.

Remember this is all about you – so your words are superimportant, y’feel me.

You can opt, if you like, for tasteful understatement: “My word. How awful.”

If not, and you want to go in for that stoned-off teenage hippy sound, then superfluous words are your bag, baby: “I reckon like this is just so not good, yeah.”

Failing that, just reel off a sequence of whatever adjectives you can think of.

Remember to always make it about yourself: “And to think I was in the next city along just 15 months ago. Truly unbelievable.”

Or: “I was supposed to go on holiday to Nice/ankara/karachi next month. What are Magenta and I supposed to do now?”

And: “Words cannot explain how I am feeling right now” (follow this with many words explaining just how you feel).

If you want to be really clever, you can turn it on its head and avoid blaming the adherents of a particularly murderous brand of religion for the atrocity and identify the real devil at work.

Always make you sure you drip warm dollops of sanctimony in first, though! “Sorry to have to bring you a serious reality check, people. But we brought this on ourselves. This is payback for the Suez Crisis/the creation of Israel/the Greek revolt against the Turks in the 1820s/the Crusades/christianity [delete as you see fit].”

And if you can’t be agged to type anything, then it’s just as meaningful to put up a picture of the flag of the country that has suffered the atrocity.

Or one of David Bowie.

Dispensing with Harrio Belli for the moment, the comment “My thoughts are with you” is one of the most popular.

We should then ask: are they? When people are not using social media to go on about their great lives, they are using it to point out how wonderfully compassionate, moral and sensitive they are.

This is egocentric and boastful.

The sentence “My thoughts are with you” is in reality like an ornament hanging on a Christmas tree. It looks nice on the outside but is invariably empty. With the start of the summer holidays, this week is the happiest time of all for Canterbury’s schoolkids.

No more tedious lectures on photosynthesis or the crosselasticity of demand, no more penises drawn on pencil cases, no more dandruffed teachers with halitosis. Well, for six weeks anyway.

One school where the break may be more welcome than anywhere else is Simon Langton Girls’ Grammar School in Old Dover Road.

School leaders are doubtless overwhelmed by relief after a summer of tumult, largely engineered by their own intransigence and unwillingness to operate transparently.

They have aborted plans to convert the Girls Langton into an academy after opposition from parents. Now, it is clear to anyone who followed the events of the summer that the opposition was organised by a ferocious and concentrated cell who adroitly exploited social media.

But it’s telling that few parents rose up to defend the school.

Even more revealing is that an effort to avoid transparency has ended up backfiring spectacularly.

People don’t like being hoodwinked. They don’t like organisations that have an interest in operating in the shadows or in secrecy. And they don’t like being presented with a fait accompli.

A couple of weeks ago, the school and its handlers at Kent County Council produced a letter in which they promised to usher in a “new climate of openness and transparency”.

Sounds good, right? One might wonder why such a climate didn’t exist already, especially in a public sector organisation tasked with educating a generation of youngsters, but we shan’t dwell on that.

The letter isn’t signed by anyone and states that it is sent “on behalf” of the school’s governing body and KCC. This opacity is intentional, the aim is to depersonalise the message, to remove the actors from the piece so that it becomes more difficult to level criticism at anyone because we don’t actually know who is speaking.

I suspect the letter is the work of someone inside the county council’s communications unit– it bears the unmistakable hallmarks of the PR bod’s quill.

Firstly, concerns about reputation are elevated to the top of the letter, a good indicator that the true objective is image management – as it always is with PR.

It says: “The widescale public opposition, including parents, pupils and staff and the negative reporting of the consultation process has been damaging to the reputation of the school and this is highly regrettable.”

We can see how “negative reporting” is identified as a factor in all this, as if the role of newsmen should be to shield the school from criticism.

The letter is also heavily propagandistic. There is talk of the excellence of the new governors joining the school to “strengthen capacity and restore confidence”.

Parents will have their complaints addressed, the school will “continue to deliver a very good education and secure the highest quality outcomes” to which the head teacher and staff are wholly committed and so on and so on.

There is an appeal for communication between the school and parents to be “characterised by respect and courtesy”, a way of attempting to soften the way complaints or criticism are presented in the future.

And then there’s the line: “The last few months have been a difficult time for the school...” As we’ve seen before, what’s bad for the leaders of an organisation isn’t necessarily bad for the organisation as a whole. Those parents who fought the Girls Langton’s academy plan would argue that what is a failure for school leaders is in fact a good result for the pupils.

The hidden story of the Girls Langton debacle is one played out repeatedly in education in Canterbury.

It is that the interests of those who run these organisations is diverging from those who use them or are associated with them.

The divergence is driven by an obsession with grand schemes or big building projects. Just running an educational establishment isn’t enough any more. There need to be exciting plans for the future.

We saw how parents at Barton Court rebelled when the grammar school announced a few years back that it had plans to sell the school site in Longport and build a new school in Herne Bay.

The University of Kent is committed to building a hotel and conference centre on grassland to the south of its campus – much to the chagrin of those who want to preserve this beautiful stretch of open space.

Canterbury College pursued building scheme after building scheme, saddling itself with massive debts that have left it no option but to scrap courses, jobs and departments. In other words, it is paying for the buildings it created for the provision of education by reducing the amount of education it provides.

Our educators’ preoccupation with expansion is becoming increasingly incompatible with what students, parents and the wider city desire from the institutions they run. To remedy it, all they need do is take a step back and refocus their energies on education.