corporal punishment in schools uk

In that year a sentence by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany (Bundesgerichtshof, case number NStZ 1993.591) was published which overruled the previous powers enshrined in unofficial customary law (Gewohnheitsrecht) and upheld by some regional appeal courts (Oberlandesgericht, Superior State Court) even in the 1970s. WebA key European Court of Human Rights judgment (1982), which hastened the demise of corporal punishment in British state schools. In my own personal view as a non-lawyer, I find some of the argumentation quite difficult to follow. R (Williamson) v Secretary of State for Education and Employment (2005) was an unsuccessful challenge to the prohibition of corporal punishment contained in the Education Act 1996, by several headmasters of private Christian schools who argued that it was a breach of their religious freedom. ", "Web linnks: corporal punishment in schools", "Supreme Court takes strap out of teachers' hands", "Corporal Punishment ~ Canada's Human Rights History", "New measures taken in schools to improve teacher-student relations", "Colombia country report - Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children", "Kansakoulun perustamisesta 150 vuotta lukemisen pelttiin laiskistavan", "Lasten ruumiillinen kuritus kiellettiin 30 vuotta sitten viel joka neljs tukistaa", "It's 40 years since corporal punishment got a general boot", http://www.endcorporalpunishment.org/wp-content/uploads/country-reports/India.pdf, "Corporal punishment against children and the law", "Teacher suspended over video of beating boy", "15-Year-Old Dies By Suicide After Being Beaten Up By Teacher, Suspended From School", "R.R. [84][80][85], In 2004 (Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v. Canada), the Supreme Court of Canada outlawed corporal punishment in all schools, public or private. [86] The practice itself had largely been abandoned in the 1970s when parents placed greater scrutiny on the treatment of children at school. See for instance this Nov 1997 news item about an under-achieving 13-year-old whose parents sent him to school in Ghana, with miraculous results, and this similar Nov 2007 report in which a British 17-year-old, sent away, also to Ghana, to study for his GCSEs, admitted he had been caned there several times and agreed he was benefiting academically from the novel experience of strict discipline. The court held that three whacks on the buttocks through shorts with a rubber-soled gym shoe, applied by the headmaster in private, did not constitute inhuman or degrading punishment. In any case it has now been superseded by the following: Hansard: New clause 21: Corporal punishment (New URL) In addition, the obligation of member states to prohibit corporal punishment in schools and elsewhere was affirmed in the 2009 Cairo Declaration on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Islamic Jurisprudence. Web(1) Corporal punishment given by, or on the authority of, a member of staff to a child (a) for whom education is provided at any school, or (b) for whom education is provided, 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. Feature article about a heavy-caning school near London. The Debate on Corporal Punishment before the European Commission and European Court of Human Rights (1978-1998) Corporal punishment sets clear boundaries and motivates children to behave in school. WebIn the mid-20th century, discipline and punishment in English schools was relatively benign. 18 required the act to be done in private; 10 mandated a witness to be present. (To a cynical young audience today, this will no doubt sound like what is inevitably nowadays called "abuse", but it felt perfectly reasonable in the context of the time.). As enacted, the law had a loophole: parents, provided they were not school staff, could still discipline their children on school grounds. The Education Act of 2002 authorizes the minister in charge of education to issue regulations concerning corporal punishment. (2) Any person who contravenes subsection (1) is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a sentence which could be imposed for assault.[165]. [150], In 1783, Poland became the first country in the world to prohibit corporal punishment. [225], Corporal punishment is technically unlawful in schools under article 75 of the Education Law 2005,[226] but there is no clear statement that corporal punishment is prohibited. He went on to observe that "nature provided a special place for boys to be punished upon and it should be used". For some early such cases, see this Dec 1900 news item and this May 1903 one (the latter being interesting also for its use by the magistrate of the colloquial term "to be swished" meaning to be caned) and this Nov 1933 one. Legality of corporal punishment of minors in Europe. School corporal punishment, historically widespread, was outlawed in different states via their administrative law at different times. One education committee, Romford (then in Essex but now part of Greater London), unusually banned public CP in 1961 after six girls were caned in front of 600 schoolmates. After all, the boy had a history of bullying, and was a tough lad -- captain of the rugby team, for heaven's sake. [7], A number of international human-rights organizations including the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have stated that physical punishment of any kind is a violation of children's human rights.[37][38][39]. [citation needed] School corporal punishment is no longer legal in any European country. [148] On the provincial level, corporal punishment was partially banned in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by two laws in 2010 and 2012, and banned by Sindh in schools in 2013. [76], Corporal punishment in all settings, including schools, was prohibited in Brazil in 2014. The use of corporal punishment in schools was prohibited by the South African Schools Act, 1996. The case concerned two Scottish boys whose parents refused to allow them to be given the belt at school. [221] It is still common in some schools in the South, and more than 167,000 students were paddled in the 20112012 school year in American public schools. [112] Teachers were not liable to criminal prosecution until 1997, when the rule of law allowing "physical chastisement" was explicitly abolished. Text of England and Wales law banning corporal punishment in all schools 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. Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, National Association of Secondary School Principals, History of youth rights in the United States, Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth, International Falcon Movement Socialist Educational International, National Union of Students LGBT+ Campaign, French petition against age of consent laws, Legal status of tattooing in European countries, Legal status of tattooing in the United States, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, School corporal punishment in the United States, Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v. Canada, Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act 2007, Christian Education South Africa v Minister of Education, R (Williamson) v Secretary of State for Education and Employment, School corporal punishment in global perspective: prevalence, outcomes, and efforts at intervention, Student/Parent Information Guide and Code of Conduct 2008-2009, "United Kingdom: Corporal punishment in schools", "Corporal punishment in schools: position paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine", "Corporal punishment in U.S. public schools: Prevalence, disparities in use, and status in state and federal policy", "School corporal punishment in global perspective: prevalence, outcomes, and efforts at intervention", "Spanking Lives On In Rural Florida Schools", Education (Corporal Punishment) (Northern Ireland) Order 1987, "School Standards and Framework Act 1998", "North Korean Defectors Face Huge Challenges", "Chinese schools try to unlearn brutality", "More Harm Than Good: A Summary of Scientific Research on the Intended and Unintended Effects of Corporal Punishment on Children", "H-515.995 Corporal Punishment in Schools", "Guidance for effective discipline. I think we can probably view this case as the absolutely final and definitive nail in the coffin of school CP in Britain. Some 20% of secondary schools did so in the 1970s, according to informal guesstimates by STOPP. 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. While most U.S. states have outlawed corporal punishment in state schools, it continues to be allowed mostly in the Southern states. Application No. [93][94][95], A 1998 study found that random physical punishment (not proper formal corporal punishment) was being used extensively by teachers in Egypt to punish behavior they regarded as unacceptable. But this was unusual, and the great majority of slipperings in British schools are believed to have gone unrecorded. 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". In fact it had no such effect, and the Head Teachers' union advised its members to continue to be "cautious" about using CP on girls. If the modern system of "school choice" had been in operation then -- or even if the local education authority had made an effort quietly to find ways of satisfying the requirements of a tiny number of (in my personal view) cranky parents, instead of being so arrogant and rigid about the whole thing -- the case would never have got off the ground and things might have gone differently over the last 40 years. By the late 2000s, over twenty years after CP was removed from state schools in 1987, 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. [133], In New Zealand's schools, corporal punishment was used commonly on both girls and boys. In the UK, this is a state high school for boys aged 11 and over. [99] The systematic use of corporal punishment has been absent from French schools since the 19th century. Then in 1977/78 came the National Union of School Students, marginally longer-lasting but scarcely any more representative of pupils generally. [223] American legal scholars have argued that school paddling is unconstitutional and can cause lasting physical, emotional, and cognitive harm. It had been very regularly used on both boys and girls in certain schools for centuries prior to the ban. Among the majority of mainstream state secondary schools, caning (usually across the seat of a bending student's trousers) had been particularly prevalent in boys-only schools of all types, from mediaeval grammar schools(5) to brand-new secondaries modern. The case concerned two Scottish boys There is some movement of changing negative disciplining methods to positive ones (non-corporal), such as teaching students how to improve when they perform badly via verbal positive reinforcement.[188]. 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. Headmasters, too, could be robust in defence of their right to use corporal punishment, as seen in this June 1968 report from their annual conference. True, a flurry of activity by the very short-lived "Schools Action Union" in 1972 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. [10] (46 of these countries also prohibited corporal punishment of children in the home as of May 2015). Today, the ban of corporal punishment in all forms, whether in schools or in the home, is vested in the Constitution of Poland. Wind forward nearly 70 years, and their unique, historic memories - and the sense of camaraderie and community that came with them - are marked in print and picture. Corporal punishment is also prohibited by the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 (RTE Act). [50], Corporal punishment in schools was banned in Austria in 1974. Other international human-rights bodies supporting prohibition of corporal punishment of children in all settings, including schools, include the European Committee of Social Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Most teachers would hold the implement by its heel and apply the sole to the offender, but some maintained that it was even more effective the other way round, with the heavier heel end being the part that made contact. This right includes a non-violent education and upbringing Consequently, all forms of physical and humiliating punishment are prohibited". Copyright C. Farrell 2008-2021 [citation needed], Much of the traditional culture that surrounds corporal punishment in school, at any rate in the English-speaking world, derives largely from British practice in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly as regards the caning of teenage boys. [228][229] The caning of girls is not particularly unusual, and girls are as likely to be caned at school as boys.[230][231][232]. Effects of Corporal Punishment Stretching Forward to Learn Despite the fact that the tradition had been forgone for nearly 30 years, legislation banning the practice entirely by law was not implemented until 2004. In this 1894 court case, a clearly out-of-control teacher was successfully prosecuted and fined for assault. [79], In public schools, the usual implement was a rubber/canvas/leather strap applied to the hands or sometimes, legs,[80][81] while private schools sometimes used a paddle or cane administered to the student's posterior. A 'reasonable chastisement' (But see this 1973 newspaper article for a round-up of the caning situation then prevailing at seven "top" private schools. It is easier to list the few maverick oddities than to try to summarise the majority: thus, the tawse was specified instead of the cane in a handful of places, including Newcastle, Gateshead, Manchester (which changed over from the cane in 1907), and Walsall. By the late 1960s the traditional "six of the best" had given way in most places to milder penalties of only two or three strokes as the norm, though to some extent this must have been compensated for by the fact that, with the advent of synthetic textiles, trouser material became significantly thinner in the 1960s. 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. No LEA banned corporal punishment altogether until 1979/80, when three Labour-controlled outer London boroughs took the abolitionist plunge, followed more famously in 1981 by the huge, Labour-controlled Inner London Education Authority (ILEA), which covered 12 London boroughs, a population of nearly 3 million, and getting on for 1,000 schools. It was not completely abolished everywhere until 1983. A REPORT AFTER THE INNER LONDON EDUCATION AUTHORITY'S BAN OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN ITS SECONDARY SCHOOLS. There was the odd exception like Northwich Girls' Grammar School; but even there, the formidable Miss Janet Dines claimed she had hardly used the cane in ten years before the event that got her into all the newspapers in 1976. An extract from the ubiquitous polymath's memoir Moab Is My Washpot (1997). In this instance the local newspaper evidently thought it remarkable; but journalists have often been poorly informed on these matters, and the anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that there were more, probably a lot more, slipperings than canings in English schools, at least in the 1960s and 1970s. A similar justification exists in Chinese-speaking countries. WebCorporal punishment should be brought back in some circumstances, but NEVER on hands! [4][5], In the English-speaking world, the use of corporal punishment in schools has historically been justified by the common-law doctrine in loco parentis, whereby teachers are considered authority figures granted the same rights as parents to discipline and punish children in their care if they do not adhere to the set rules. A few schools made the slipper their "official" implement, administered it formally in the office, entered the slipperings in the punishment book, and did not use the cane at all. 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