Ann Maguire was a dedicated teacher, utterly devoted to the children in her care. She had worked in the teaching profession for over four decades, had a loving husband, two grown-up daughters and, after the death of her sister 30 years earlier, selflessly raised her two nephews as her own. She was a good person who clearly cared about others. But tragically, back in 2014, she was brutally murdered by a disturbed and deranged pupil. She was attacked and stabbed seven times in her classroom, as she marked another pupil’s work.
Since then, disgracefully, her bereaved husband’s attempts to find out about the circumstances surrounding her death have been met by a wall of silence. A secretive internal report was followed by an inquest in which the coroner refused to interview the killer’s friends and classmates – quite an omission when investigating, among other things, whether the murderer had evinced any signs of what was to come in the weeks and months leading up to the crime, I would suggest.
Needless to say, both concluded that the school was not to blame in any way for Mrs Maguire’s tragic death; it had not failed in its statutory duty to protect her welfare at work; in short, there’s nothing to see here, guv.
This, I’m almost certain, is utter hogwash. Over my 15-year teaching career, I’ve worked in lots of different schools, and, without exception, in every single one of them, senior leaders and school governors have failed in their duty to protect their staff. Teachers are assaulted with impunity. Sometimes we’re even blamed for the assaults we suffer, as though we’ve somehow aggravated and antagonised our attackers.
In the real world, you’d be forgiven for assuming that violent pupils are permanently excluded in an effort to protect their peers and, of course, us teachers – we’re humans too! But you would be very much mistaken. Pupils who attack their peers and teachers are rarely permanently excluded. They may experience a week in isolation or, in some schools, a brief suspension, but they are, as I say, rarely permanently excluded.
So teachers and pupils are expected to run the gauntlet, day-in, day-out, anxiously awaiting the next outburst from our more violent charges, with not so much as a whisper of protest. If we do, we risk attracting the opprobrium of our senior leaders and, in my case, our CEO.
I currently work in a school that refuses to exclude pupils, no matter how violent. Indeed, our most severe punishment is a brief spell in isolation. The result: anarchy and chaos, a brutish Hobbesian nightmare as children, unprotected and fearful, fight for their survival.
Others simply leave, hoping that their next school will be different. Last week, a pupil was forced to leave after being attacked a second time by an unrepentant thug. His parents, understandably, chose to move him. The alternative was to throw him to the wolves. The trouble is, his new school will probably be no different – at least we're honest about our no-exclusion policy. As a head of year, since September, I’ve admitted several new pupils desperate to escape violence and bullying in their previous schools. To my shame, I am prohibited from telling them that our school is no different. If anything, it’s probably worse.
One of my colleagues, moreover, has been absent for the last seven days. He was attacked by a pupil who repeatedly slammed a door into his back. Astonishingly, the pupil was back in school the very next day. Another deeply disturbed boy has physically attacked his peers and two of my colleagues. He also keeps threatening to stab us. He really is a tragedy waiting to happen. God forbid, if the worst should happen, and he was to maim, hospitalise or even kill someone, the school would be responsible. It could not honestly say that the warning signs weren’t there, could it?
I suspect that Ann Maguire’s school had a number of warning signs before her tragic end, too. That’s why they’ve seemingly done everything to obstruct a thorough, transparent investigation – an investigation that would not only expose the school’s failings but start a nationwide conversation about the abject failure, no refusal, of schools to protect their staff and pupils from violent thugs.
Such a conversation would reveal the widespread incompetence of senior leaders and education trusts – in thrall to discredited progressive ideas that proscribe the punishment of poorly behaved pupils – the inadequate nature of our organisational structures (in short, we need more special schools for violent and emotionally disturbed children), the failure of the unions to protect their members and the egregious state of Ofsted’s inspection regime.
When you consider these myriad failings and the vested interests that their exposure would harm, a cover-up seems eminently preferable for everyone involved – everyone, that is, except Ann Maguire’s family.
The author's name has been changed