The risks of a safety scheme fraught with flaws
RISK is an essential c omponent of a balanced childhood, but who f ancies booking their child up for a weekend retreat with Bear Grylls on Snake Island, or setting fire to the iPad and abandoning a six year old by Loch Lomond with a compass?
Children should be in danger more often according to Dame Judith Elizabeth Hackitt of the Health and Safety Executive, and this isn’t just about the obesity crises but also because an ‘excessively risk-averse’ culture may damage their ability to cope later on in the real world, leaving us with a generation of perpetual children.
I had a Seventies childhood, an era where staring into the eyeballs of peril was an acceptable part of the deal. On a recent trip back home, I passed my childhood den, which was not a treehouse or the clubhouse shed favoured by Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven, but a disused sewer.
Adults couldn’t squeeze into the outlet pipe – which added to its allure – but local children used to crawl up to access the ante-chamber that acted as headquarters, where we could read comics and eat peanut butter sandwiches.
I’m pretty sure this did not prepare us for anything in the adult world, unless it involved a stretch in Shawshank Prison.
WE also played on building sites, which is why I have a huge scar on my knee, and scaled shaky ladders to access intriguing garrets. Aged four I descended from one such attic at speed and without a ladder, fracturing my collarbone and splitting open my skull when the freefall ended. Emergency surgery has left me with a livid five inch scar.
Actually, forget Shawshank Prison: if they ever remake Jaws, I can provide some new material for the scene where Quint and Hooper get drunk and compare old wounds.
Perhaps children do thrive in lessprotected environments, but the adults still need monitoring.
My bog-standard Scottish comprehensive used to allow the teachers to hit children with a leather strap and when I was 11, I was belted on the hand for accepting a piece of gum from a schoolfriend on the way out of a classroom. I’m certain the experience did not make me braver, because afterwards I wept from the pain and shame.
However, it did make me wonder why grown-ups were permitted to inflict lasting welts on young children. Also: What kind of adult educator is happy to use this power?
Now we have the current row over Named Person legislation, caused by Holyrood nodding through a carelessly-framed Bill – as MSPs do, far too often in the absence of a second chamber. Its problems are many: data- sharing without consent, Orwellian control of the family, and confusion over whether only our First Minister regards the scheme to be optional.
Named Person also places the onus on one person to co-ordinate multiple agencies and take the blame when the system fails. Teachers i n particular seem to be expected to add social engineering and healing to their current workload – in which case, they should be held in higher regard, and paid a damn sight more.
A poorly thought-out policy, the SNP’s Named Person gives a false sense of security, is disrespectful to responsible parents, and wastes public money that could be more smartly applied to funding education and social care.