The year Tony Blair won a historic third general election for New Labour and England finally managed to regain The Ashes which, ironically, they had last won just as the smacking ban was introduced. Or anywhere else whether on hand with comfort blankets or not. Still, may not sound so bad as a time for such a change. I mean, in the s we were still smoking on planes and driving leaded cars. Finland followed suit in the late s. Even the Soviet Union gave it up by So why is England so hit-thirsty?
One can only speculate if these days he would be made into a hero or villain by the tabloid press. Perhaps it would. But given everywhere else has coped without it for more than years it was probably just as well that his amendment fell. In my first month as headteacher in January , HMI with responsibility for Independent schools visited the school to feel my collar. He checked the school boundary, to make sure I knew it was secure, he checked the admissions register to ensure I knew how to admit and depart pupils, he checked the daily attendance register to ensure I monitored absence and its causes, and he checked that I kept a punishment book normal quarto exercise book, nothing fancy and wrote in it the details of the child, the reason and the number of strokes with a cane I had administered at one sitting.
I was advised never to hit a child more than 6 times at a visit. HMI passed over to me an leaflet advertising the supply of school rattan canes — he made it quite clear I could not use a garden bamboo from the greenhouse. Caning rapidly reduced during my first three years, as I had to navigate through the expectations of teachers whose weekly spellings and homework defaults were supported by such punishments.
To truly put the tin lid on any ideas of european grandeur I might have had, my parents were both from the Isle of Man!! I and many of my friends where caned in school in the isle of man and now when I tell my children when I was your age I got caned for missing lessons or talking in class they look horrified.
I now realise how wrong it was and how perverse the teachers giving the punishment where. I feel like making our government apologies for allowing this to go on so long.
The judges heard that the boy was beaten with a three-foot long garden cane. Some of the blows were inflicted directly on to bare skin. The stepfather was cleared of assault in after arguing he practised "reasonable chastisement" under the Children and Young Persons Act. But the boy took his case to the European court. The European judgment said the beating amounted to "considerable force" on more than one occasion.
The judges said the UK Government was responsible because the law "did not provide adequate protection to the applicant". It quoted the European Convention of Human Rights which says: "No-one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Some old-established boys' secondary grammar schools, such as Stamford Grammar School , did so until around the middle of the 20th century.
An outlier in this regard was Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe , where big boys were empowered to formally slipper smaller ones until as recently as At my own similarly ancient grammar school, this practice was always said to have been stopped in the s. Of course, a prefect in any school could always send an errant student to the headmaster, which at some schools would automatically mean a caning, and in some cases the prefect might be a witness to the castigation.
Also, some schools, even new-built comprehensive ones, introduced a system of "students' courts" at which a recommendation for CP might be one of the "sentencing" options available, but this was subject to confirmation by the teachers in charge, and it would be a member of staff who delivered the actual punishment. I have heard of at least one Birmingham secondary modern school in the s where this caning allegedly took place "there and then", in front of the members of the "court", but I suspect this, if true, was quite unusual.
It cannot be emphasised too strongly that these are all broad generalisations , to which exceptions could always be found. A left-wing back-bench move in Parliament to ban CP at national level failed by votes to in Attempts to push through local bans in Cardiff and Liverpool had both collapsed in the face of hostility from head teachers.
Several more Labour-controlled LEAs followed suit in the early s. Certainly, from the late s onwards, it put out plenty of controversial propaganda , especially in the form of letters to local newspapers, but there is some evidence that the real push for abolition within a number of LEAs came rather more from leftwing Labour councillors in collaboration with a far-left ginger group within the National Union of Teachers NUT called "Rank and File", with which STOPP's always small membership somewhat overlapped.
To put this in context, it should be remembered that the s and early s in Britain was a period when the far left was successfully infiltrating many local Labour Parties and several trade unions. Many NUT members in the union's mainstream, and certainly the great majority of members of all the other teaching unions, were not at all in favour of abolition. NASUWT members tended to complain that NUT was much too dominated by female primary-school teachers who had no experience of the problems facing teaching staff in tough secondary schools.
Headmasters, too, could be robust in defence of their right to use corporal punishment, as seen in this June report from their annual conference. It is a myth that abolition was overwhelmingly demanded by school pupils themselves. True, a flurry of activity by the very short-lived "Schools Action Union" in briefly gained some press publicity , but this was a tiny, and almost certainly highly unrepresentative, group based entirely in a small number of London schools and manipulated, if not indeed created, by older students on the far left.
It campaigned more against unofficial and irregular CP, as in this Aug report and this May one , than against CP as a whole. A survey of young people found that half of them were in favour of retaining CP at school, including many who had themselves been caned or strapped. By the s, over a quarter of a century after CP was removed from state schools in , there was still a lack of consensus on the issue, with many parents and commentators , some teachers and community leaders and even young people continuing to believe that moderate and properly regulated caning or belting, in Scotland helped to maintain order, and was a much more constructive response to serious misdeeds than suspension or expulsion, which merely grant a "holiday" to those who refuse to behave.
Clearly, it is widely felt that the anarchy and chaos now evidently prevailing in so many state schools -- and the poor educational standards that result -- are due at least in part to the enforced absence of corporal punishment.
Others, though, including probably most politicians and "experts", will still defend abolition as the right decision on balance, or at least as inevitable under European human rights legislation. The only thing on which everybody seems to agree is that, for better or worse, there is no realistic prospect of CP ever being restored in Britain.
In a new round of controversy over the issue was set off when a survey found that one teacher in five, and almost a quarter of all secondary school teachers, would still like to see corporal punishment reinstated. And as recently as the co-founder and chairman of the governors of the most high-profile of the then brand-new so-called "Free Schools" said he would happily restore CP if it were allowed.
In a prominent newspaper columnist -- who happens to be the wife of a senior member of the present government -- announced that she had changed her mind about CP for school bullies. One consequence of the perceived collapse in school discipline has been a tendency for some especially immigrant-descended parents to send their teens abroad to complete their secondary studies, often to Africa or the Caribbean, where a stricter and more structured education, including CP where necessary, is still available.
See e. See likewise Children sent to Caribbean for 'basic' schooling , a news report from July , and UK Ugandans rush kids to Kampala schools , from May The Friends Reunited evidence What do the Friends Reunited anecdotal recollections tell us about the nature, distribution and incidence of corporal punishment in English schools in the s and s?
A feature article including a table of "The top 50 CP schools". The Cane and the Tawse in Scottish Schools Feature article on corporal punishment north of the border. Caning in Private Schools, s Extract from a sociological study of elite boys' private schools in , giving statistics for how many senior boys and how many teachers were allowed to administer corporal punishment and a discussion of the frequency of use of the cane.
Stretching Forward to Learn An article by one who received school CP in the s: what it was like, and how he feels about it now.
It suggests that over a long period the idea that schoolteachers are to be regarded as in effect "substitute parents", and therefore should have the same disciplinary powers in law as parents, became gradually more and more questioned by the public, at least as far as ordinary day schools are concerned the concept has always seemed to me to make more sense in relation to boarding schools.
Also some worthwhile commentary about how attitudes slowly changed after the second world war, and the fluctuating views of the various teachers' trade unions during the s and s debates about abolition. Spare the Rod Short article in History Today Nov asserts that it was only in the s that ordinary class teachers gained the right to use CP; before that, only head teachers were legally entitled to do so, under the common-law doctrine of in loco parentis.
No source is cited for this claim. The author finds that, "far from being a relic of a cruel Victorian past, corporal punishment became more frequent and institutionalised in 20th-century England", but seems to overlook the obvious fact that the main reason it became more prevalent was that the number of secondary-school students soared, as the age up to which education was compulsory was steadily increased by law over the decades.
Corporal Punishment Archive Covers the UK only, with a major emphasis on school CP but also some interesting material about judicial and military juvenile punishments of the past. Includes an excellent gallery of historical drawings and numerous other illustrations as well as some well-chosen historical texts.
He was often caned at Stouts Hill prep school around , but harbours no grudges. He takes the view, which I tend to share, that corporal punishment, in the great scheme of things, is not actually a very important issue one way or the other.
But it has now become "so culturally loaded as to be almost impossible to inspect", with all the talk of "abuse" causing "hysteria, madness and stupidity in almost everybody".
Other kinds of punishment were more damaging, he suggests. Corporal punishment Encyclopaedia entry from summarising the state of the law at the time: teachers had the common-law right to chastise their pupils, not only for offences at school but also, under a court ruling of , for those committed on the way to or from school, or during school hours.
However, these powers were subject to any regulations made by the local education authority. R v Secretary of State for Education and Employment and Others ex parte Williamson and Others This important document is the full Law Lords ruling in the case brought by a group of Christian schools against the legislative ban on corporal punishment in all schools, even private ones.
The schools claimed that their "freedom of belief", as protected by human rights legislation, was infringed because it was their Christian belief that naughty children should be spanked. As reported in these February news items , the highest court in the land dismissed their claims, upholding government and parliament in the blanket prohibition of all and any school CP. I think we can probably view this case as the absolutely final and definitive nail in the coffin of school CP in Britain. There are actually three different opinions here, by three judges who appear somewhat to disagree with each other, arriving at the same conclusion by different routes.
In my own personal view as a non-lawyer, I find some of the argumentation quite difficult to follow. Much of it seems rather subjective , and I can't entirely avoid the feeling when reading judgments of this kind that the judges are, to put the matter in demotic terms, "just playing with words" or "making it up as they go along". My suspicion that there isn't really a solid consensus about this, and that perhaps an apparent consensus on the final outcome is being fabricated for reasons of political expediency, is strengthened by the fact that one of the judges here, Baroness Hale, goes so far as to say that she is "deeply troubled" by the approach adopted by the Court of Appeal.
In effect she seems to be saying that the Court of Appeal reached the right conclusion but for quite the wrong reasons. Her approach is an extreme "children's rights" one - she clearly holds that it is quite immaterial what the teachers and parents might think , and that the child's supposed "right" not to be spanked overrides anything his parents say.
I seriously doubt whether more than a minute fraction of ordinary people share this view. She doesn't, as far as I can see, comment on the possibility that the child himself might take a different view, perhaps preferring being spanked to some other punishment. At all events, I have to say that after over an hour's careful perusal I put this document down feeling completely unconvinced that these private schools should be prevented by law from mildly spanking their students when necessary, if that is what the parents want.
Application No. The medical evidence was that the marks on his bottom were already fading by the following day. Note that the Commission emphasises that such a school caning in a headmaster's study is an entirely different matter from judicial birching of the kind considered in the Isle of Man case, reaffirming once again that corporal punishment is not per se necessarily contrary to the Human Rights Convention. However, in the end it is on a legal technicality time limits expired that the case is thrown out.
The punishment was administered by the headmaster, Mr Blackshaw, who allegedly took a run-up at each stroke though this was denied by the authorities. The case for indignation on the part of the boy seems somewhat undermined by the evidence that he "subsequently showed off the marks of his punishment to other boys with pride". The Commission was divided there are three dissenting opinions but the majority thought this particular caning, which caused weals, swelling and bruising, was , unlike other school cases considered, serious enough to be "degrading treatment" under Article 3 of the Convention.
To me, this decision seems perverse. After all, the boy had a history of bullying , and was a tough lad -- captain of the rugby team, for heaven's sake. He had previously been caned at his prep school, without complaint.
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