I am a secondary school teacher in an inner-London school. We have a student body that is overwhelming non-white British.
In the context of the horrifying treatment of Child Q, our students were understandably asking many questions about whether we as teachers, could be trusted by them.
The sheer number of questions necessitated a discussion of the case occurred within a staff briefing, but it also left me devastated that a number of teachers in a different borough had destroyed my relationship with the students.
At this briefing, we were given an update on the facts of the case and how the school will react to this case. The discussion was productive, particularly around suspected drug possession. We were additionally informed that unless it was a dealing level found, the police would not be contacted. A crucial and needed policy. Essentially adopting a decriminalisation policy.
The mere existence of these questions says a lot about the breakdown in relationship between the public services of education and the police. If the school can’t trust the police, then why should the children. If the children have been let down by the teachers and the police, then why should they trust either.
The brutal reality of teaching is that you work as many hours as a city lawyer and are expected to be teacher, social worker and parent rolled into one. This being said, I would not trade my job for the world.
However, this perilously difficult job can only work if the children trust you. The consequences of a breakdown in that trust mean that safeguarding concerns around abuse are never heard. Bluntly, the consequence is that already vulnerable children get let down.
An overwhelming majority of the anger around this case has been anger directed towards the Metropolitan Police, but this ignores the fact that a series of teachers, with experience and safeguarding training, stood by and let the police abuse their powers. It is undeniable that these educators played an embarrassingly large role in violating Child Q’s rights.
As teachers, we have a duty of care to our students, when I teach, my priority is creating an environment where young people can flourish safely, then the content delivery and learning will actually take place.
The catastrophic failures by the Met and the responsible teachers, have directly undermined the work of thousands of teachers across diverse communities in London and elsewhere. Their actions make the jobs of my fellow teachers and I, immeasurably more difficult by driving a divide between teachers and students in communities that need good teachers.
This sets a terrifying precedent for the safeguarding of our most vulnerable children, but it also throws into jeopardy their social development as they will grow up being unable to trust the very people trusted to safeguard them.
In the coming months, as a profession we need to ensure that we create an environment where our students from all backgrounds, but particularly from minority backgrounds, know that their school is a safe place for them to thrive and grow.
It is imperative that we as a profession know that we are not entirely responsible for the treatment of Child Q. However, we must acknowledge, in a way the Met has consistently failed to do so, that we played a part by letting her down.
* Magister Iuvenum is a teacher at an inner-city school in London. His identity is known to the LDV team.
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10 Comments
I also work in education, but take a different view from you on the issue of drugs in schools. My experience – and I have to address drug issues in school on a weekly basis – is that there are two separate issues here: pupils under the influence of substances unknown, and pupils caught in possession of substances. In both cases, though different, the first concern has to be the health and safety of the pupil. Thereafter, for the safety of the wider school community, we need to establish whether some pupil is working as a dealer themselves or as a go-between for a dealer, or whether a dealer is hanging around the school seeking to target pupils. I know of too many cases of 13 year old girls ending up performing ‘sexual favours’ to males in their 20s, 30s and 40s to pay off their drug debts to think that schools should not be seeking to address these issues. While schools can do some of the investigative work themselves, the police have to be part of the process to ensure that prosecutions of adults pushing and supplying drugs to children are not compromised. You mention that schools may lose the trust of pupils for taking a stand against drugs in our schools – sorry, but we risk losing the trust and support of the majority of pupils, and their parents/carers, if we don’t.
The full facts are I guess yet to emerge, but normally strip searching, particularly of children would I understand require the authority of an Inspector, with special paperwork to be signed off. At a police station an Appropriate Adult would be in attendance, indeed maybe taking the girl under arrest to the local nick would have been a much better option, where there would have been a careful adherence to practice and procedures.
On the face of it there appears to have been a lack of appropriate training to the Police Officers themselves and in this case was the School Head or Duty Head aware of what was going on? Were the Officers involved attached to the School or did they just enter of their own volition or with whose authority?
As someone who is frequently involved in these difficult procedures I find the total circumstances baffling to say the least, normally the police at the Custody Units carry out the unpleasant task in as dignified manner as possible.
This is I hope a strange, seemingly highly inappropriate, one off case.
Agree with most of this post but please don’t exaggerate: to say that teachers work as many hours as a city lawyer suggests you’ve never met a city lawyer. Hours certainly aren’t everything but that statement simply isn’t true
The case of child Q has caused outrage and universal condemnation of the actions of that school and the Police. I find it hard to follow an argument which suggests this undermines trust in teachers, and makes children feel less safe. There can’t be a single teacher in the country who doesn’t now know, if they didn’t before, that their duty is to protect children in their care. Unpleasant though it was for child Q, her ordeal has not created a “terrifying precedent”, and has in fact made a repeat of such appalling behaviour extremely unlikely.
Adultification is a phenomenon long known to black communities, whether it’s the presumption that a boy is a man or a black girl is a fully grown woman. It represents a genuinely insidious and obnoxious aspect of racism. Black children are all too often seen through the prism of race and are constantly assessed by authority figures as a threat. They’re disproportionately punished and routinely disbelieved. We have witnessed this Adultification phenomena in the UK in regards to both child refugees and Black British children.
@Brad Barrows
“While schools can do some of the investigative work themselves, the police have to be part of the process to ensure that prosecutions of adults pushing and supplying drugs to children are not compromised.”
I do hope you aren’t implying that strip-searching a 15-year=old girl (who as I understand was menstruating at the time) without at the very least an appropriate adult being present was an acceptable ‘part of the process’!
It appears the school staff were not aware of the strip-search at the time (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/25/child-q-school-confirms-staff-were-not-aware-strip-search-had-taken-place). It comes across as the staff having abandoned matters to the police.
Are not teachers supposed to act as ‘in loco parentis’? Or has that concept disappeared?
@Nonconformistradical
I certainly didn’t intend to imply that the decision to strip-search the child was appropriate – I did, however, intend to push back at the suggestion that the police should only be contacted if ‘dealing level’ drug possession is suspected. I would add that I have been present as ‘the responsible adult’ at many police searches of pupils – for both drugs and weapons – and never has it ever been suggested that anything approaching a strip-search was in any way necessary. The nearest situation I can recall where a strip search may have been justified was a case where a pupil had collapsed and was comatose after ingesting some substance and, while an ambulance sped him to hospital, the police urgently needed to discover what he may have taken by searching the boy who supplied it. Even then, when a boy’s life was on the line, the search left him in his underwear. So I can not understand why the police could possibly feel justified in acting as they did in the case of the 15 year old girl, and certainly can’t understand why ‘the school’ appears to have chosen to allow it to happen.
It is not possible to legislate against idiocy, in fact, legislation too often encourages idiocy or at least encourages thoughtless responses.
In this case whoever was in a position to think it was a good idea to go to the ‘Safer Schools’ police officer should be moved from that position. It should have been obvious that the answer was never going to be to let the matter drop. Even if the school had strong grounds for believing someone who was sitting an exam had been profiteering from pushing drugs, there would no case for interrupting the exam. My advice is that if there is a strong chance of getting the wrong answer, don’t ask the question.
The key factor should be the immediate or impending likelihood of harm to other students or staff. Such a likelihood appears to have been entirely absent. The strip search itself is incomprehensible. Incomprehensible that the police involved could not recognise the illegality of their actions.
Teachers’ duty of care does mean that there may be cases where police involvement may well be necessary. While teaching in an inner London comprehensive for 7 years, I was aware of just one such incident, where the school had been tipped off that a boy had carried a hand gun into the school. The police action was swift and decisive, the boy and his bag were separately seized, no doubt a shock for pupils in the class at the time, but also a relief.
It is interesting that so many male commentators here and elsewhere are surprised by this horrifying case. Inappropriate internal examinations are regularly part of the system to keep women compliant in prisons, policing, psychiatric and even medical environments.
It is possible that the police officers involved (who lacked all common sense apart from anything) thought just getting this poor girl to remove her towel or tampon was a small indignity compared with a full internal examination. Horrifying.
Lost in the undeniably important debate about racism, sexism, misuse of police powers, and the responsibilities of teachers, is the question of why cannabis can only be got from illegal dealers, when other drugs like tobacco, alcohol and caffeine (all chemically addictive, whereas cannabis is more accurately described as habit-forming) can be bought in shops. Making cannabis illegal has not prevented it being used by millions of us (a long time ago in my case), but it is directly responsible for the ordeal suffered by child Q, and for the exploitation of children in county lines, and for the gang violence arising during turf warfare.