What did you do at school today? The proverbial question offered at dinner tables across the land.
Followed by “answers” which are harder to pull than teeth.
Imagine though if the answer is “I watched a girl get her head kicked in class” followed by “Look, I’ve got a video of it on my phone.”
I’ve seen the shocking footage from Waid Academy which has been shown to The Courier.
Schools are meant to be safe places
It is graphic, violent and will stir a visceral response in anyone that sees it.
You can’t help but watch it and want something to be done, to question why the police aren’t involved and to feel a sense of anger and exasperation.
Schools are meant to be safe places. We trust that when children go there and we go to work, that there’s nowhere safer they could be.
Bullying. It’s something we’ve all seen or experienced.
We’ve all either been on the end of it, seen it, or if we are truly honest with ourselves, we can hark back to a time when we were the ones who were cruel. Who laughed when they shouldn’t? Who didn’t step in to help?
I remember the faces of kids I went to school with in the late 90s who had the most torrid time because they were different. I remember teenage me concluding that the worst thing in the world you could or should be was different.
If it happened in the street amongst adults it would be common assault.
Bullying is of course a very serious matter. It’s age old, schools are highly alert to it and teachers more than qualified to deal with it, rooted in the best evidence and the best interests of the child.
This video is more than bullying though. It’s abject assault.
If it happened in the street amongst adults it would be common assault. There’s no doubt about that.
When should police get involved?
So what is the role of police in our schools?
At the time of writing the police say the assault has not been reported to them so there’s no action for them to take.
The protocol says a decision like that depends on a discussion between the parents or carers of the children involved.
Yet a video exists. How it’s reported can be done sensitively by a community paper but it could also appear randomly on TikTok or Facebook.
It could fuel reprisals. It could affect the lives of all involved long after cuts and bruises heal.
Whilst the video is a clear one of two children, there are others in the video too with their backs to violence, head down in their books.
You can’t help but assume that they are petrified. How are they thinking and feeling today?
Also what of the teachers themselves.
They are far from immune to the impact this will have on the school environment, how they feel at their work and how the children carry themselves.
The headteacher was quick to highlight just how unrepresentative this behaviour was of Waid pupils and that needs repeating, but there’s still a big problem here and it will become a bigger one if it’s shaken off as a one off or outlier event.
At the tail end of 2022, teachers in Glasgow went on strike not for more pay as many are doing now, but because of rising violence and poor behaviour in the classroom.
If we are to do right about our young people, our response to this must be far greater and more thoughtful than seeking to punish one child for one violent act.
Conversation