A school in Stoke on Trent has suspended eleven children who walked out because they felt that their education was being disrupted by a high turnover of supply teachers.
We have discussed the situation in some British schools before, and of course the stock argument will be that these children should have just shut up and stayed put and taken whatever the local education authority felt that they were worthy of in the way of teaching.
I can’t help feeling however, that when people refused to be written off as “second-best” and accept less than they should expect by right, that it is a positive development; even if they are under 16 years of age. If my experiences of listening to ex-students as an adult education tutor are anything to go by then the school in question is far from an exception and such protests are likely to spread widely. This is without mentioning other ways children are deprived of an education or are allowed to develop into the kind of bully that we saw on CBB last week (and that’s what it was kids, the “learned behaviour” of a playground bully in the face of a perceived “threat”.) How many children in how many schools did not have the composure and confidence of Shilpa? How many teachers (like channel 4 bosses) did not step in?
So. Are these children right to take the action which they have in order to demand an education? Or is there a better way that they could have gone about it?
