Topics came up that edged around the core of what I normally understand as safeguarding, and into areas to do more with wellbeing and welfare: drug use, underage vaping, online bullying, and so on. The contrast with my own schooling in the 1980s struck me. The teachers at my provincial boys' state grammar school were mainly decent sorts, but they saw their job as keeping order and delivering lessons. Quite apart from the tendency of some members of staff to involve the use of projectiles to carry out these basic tasks - I suppose the woodwork master must have worked out how to throw a chisel across a classroom so as to minimise the possibility of serious injury - there was really very little interest in what happened outside the school. That just wasn't its concern. Even on the premises, beyond the classroom we were left to our own devices, and the school was pretty much a feral environment of persecution, low-level violence and cruelty. I think any suggestion that anyone should look for signs of pupils being unhappy would have been met with incomprehension: of course they were unhappy. Misery was built into the experience. Even in the early 2000s, a friend told me when I talked about this, her own grammar school turned a deliberate blind eye to the difficulties she was having at home. Someone else's problem.
It occurs to me that this is a colossal change that has happened over the last couple of decades: how the life-experiences of children has become the business of schools in particular is remarkable and would be worth someone studying properly.
I found that safeguarding turned into a small parallel enterprise attached to many institutions. When people have a mortgage to pay, who can blame them for developing convoluted policies, codes of conduct, and guidelines that only they can authoritatively comment upon?
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to see some of the safeguarding cases that the C of E throws up. The use of the "S word" applied to some hapless bishop or dean conjures images of gross abuse, but it often turns out that they merely fell foul of some complicated rule of disclosure set out in obscure documents that only lawyers would spend much time on.
It is indeed remarkable, as I said elsewhere, that the CofE seems capable simultaneously of wrecking people's lives with hypercautious and unquestioning pursuit of allegations that don't exist, and turning its back on genuine harm happening round the corner.
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