School Days

They keep changing the definition of ‘reasonable force’.

Now, it’s not that I want to go around being forceful – in fact, in general, I’d say I err on the side of reason over force, but I do think we need to know exactly how far we are allowed to go.

The main problem is that every case is different and, even more complicated, it’s not up to the person acting with force to judge what is ‘reasonable’ according to his or her own values. And a child’s definition might be very different from an adult’s.

Children seem to think we cannot touch them at all. I put a gentle, not even restraining hand on a child’s shoulder to encourage him to work and he looked up and muttered, ‘You have five seconds, Miss.’ I genuinely needed an explanation. ‘If you touch me for more than five seconds, it constitutes an assault,’ said the mini-lawyer and, to be fair, he laughed.

The truth is, we hardly ever need protection against children physically. We are more likely to be hurt by being in the way when we are trying to stop a fight than to be fought with ourselves.

But where we do occasionally need protection is against children’s skewed view of the world. A boy, famous for disrupting lessons in class and smoking when he is skiving, recently accused a colleague of ‘being a paedo’ for watching him as he returned to a classroom.

A girl, years ago, developed a crush on me and the next thing I knew, she was telling other students we were having an affair and were regularly having secret meetings in Mcdonald’s. That was an easy one to refute. Rather than bothering to deny the ludicrous love story, I only had to say, with a look of offended shock, ‘Do you really think I’d eat in Mcdonald’s?’, for the rumour to be squashed.

But, at times, the very physicality of these large young people (both boys and girls) does, suddenly, become threatening – and then where are we?

On the one hand, leaks from the Department of Education suggest that, in view of the increasing bad behaviour of the young, we are going to be allowed a little more physical leeway. On the other hand, we are told that we cannot even stand in the way of a child who is trying to leave a room without permission.

I knew one fearsome woman (now long dead) who stood so close to children while shouting at them that before lessons with her they were often physically sick with fear. She backed them against a wall so they could not move away, and there was barely air between the two bodies. She was a vile bully of the worst order. What she was doing would not actually have counted as force at all, but the terror she produced was much worse than any physical intervention in a fight, or blocking of a child’s exit from a room.

Which is why the word ‘reasonable’, although it sounds eminently sensible, is in fact nonsensical. I have, in my time, grabbed a child’s arm. I have blocked a child from leaving a room, and another from getting too close to a child he was threatening. I have pulled a child off another child while he was trying to strangle her with a tie. In some of those cases, I was using quite a lot of force.

But I have never frightened a child into vomiting. That is, I suppose, a fine boast.