Toilets

Every so often there will be an outbreak of school toilet mania on Edutwitter. Occasionally, it might even occur in the media. It largely consists of people who have no idea what it’s like to work in a challenging secondary school, being shocked that access to the toilets is in any way restricted.

The cause of these outbursts seems to be a complete lack of awareness of all the problems associated with secondary school toilets. This is combined with an equally thorough lack of awareness of the fact that secondary school-age pupils may actually get some pleasure from skipping lessons to hang out with their friends, play on their phones or just avoid hard work. Some are oblivious to this, and to the fact that this can be the case regardless of the merits of the subject, the teacher, or the lesson. If kids can arse about in the cinema where 100s of millions of dollars have been spent to grab their attention and engage them, they can definitely choose to arse about out of lessons rather than learn how to simplify fractions.

I wrote about this issue before in this post. The summary of problematic toilet-related behaviours stands the test of time:

There are several reasons why teachers can’t just let students answer the call of nature:

• There is often a problem of internal truancy. Students who should be in lessons stay in the corridors. Sometimes they play games or attempt to intimidate passers-by. Every so often they disrupt lessons by running in to classrooms, or reaching in and switching off the lights. Often they write graffiti, or look for things to break. Any student allowed out of lessons risks swelling their ranks.
• There are students who will ask to go to the loo every single lesson. This is not an exaggeration. At my school students have to ask at an office for a key to let them into the toilets. One of the women working in the office reported seeing the same girl five times during the average school day. (And, no, the girl didn’t have a medical complaint other than a severe allergy to school work).
• There are classes where up to half the students will ask to go to the loo. In some year groups asking to go to the toilet when they are presented with hard work has become an automatic response. Once one child has asked, then many others will also ask. Sometimes many will have notes from their parents claiming a medical condition.
• There is an ongoing problem of toilets being vandalised. I mentioned before that school toilets are unpleasant. Much of this is down to vandalism, or actions that have been taken to prevent vandalism (like removing all soap or paper towels).

Also, I stand by this concluding comment:

Nobody is arguing for kids never being let out, even if they are going to soil themselves, or have a medical condition. All we are saying is that staying in the room is the normal expectation, and exceptions should be exceptional.

Does anything need to be updated? Has anything changed since I wrote that in 2008? I would suggest there are two big developments.

Firstly, vaping. In my time in teaching, schools went from tolerating smoking as a fact of life to almost completely eliminating it. However, schools are now being plagued by the slightly more fragrant version of it known as vaping. One of the biggest problems now with letting kids out to the loo is that some will go out to vape. If toilets are not monitored, they will become the place to vape, and this will happen in and out of lesson time. This is not just bad because of the addiction and the violation of rules. It is also the case that any place where illicit activity is happening is a place that will feel unsafe to many pupils. If vaping isn’t prevented, pupils will fear that bullying and violence also won’t be prevented. Additionally, a safe place for pupils to have their nicotine hit may also become a safe place for pupils to take other drugs.

The other difference from when I was writing before is the much greater concern about mental health. A lot can be said about how schools have often chosen unwise ways to respond to the perception of worsening mental health among pupils. But one of these, which seems to have appeared without much thought, is the idea that a vacation to the toilets can be a suitable response to anxiety. Not only have schools been known to issue toilet passes for this reason, but this has been suggested as a reason why schools should cease restricting access to the toilets. This seems to me to be one of those situations where the extent of a problem is unknown and the effectiveness of the response to the problem is unknown, but schools do it anyway because “something must be done”. I would argue that this is a bad policy. Any intervention to address mental health problems should be evidence-based and officially recorded. It should not involve reduced supervision of the pupil, nor should it provide obvious incentives to other pupils to claim to be unwell. If you have significant numbers of pupils leaving lessons due to their mental health, this is not an appropriate provision, and not what toilets are for. It is likely to obscure the extent of those difficulties, and potentially encourage others to adopt unhealthy patterns of behaviour.

Finally, I will add a few words about an argument I keep seeing, but didn’t mention in the previous post. People love to object to restrictions on going to the toilets, or indeed any school rule, on the grounds that it is not preparing pupils for adult life and is not like what happens in “the workplace”. While there are obvious questions as to why we should expect schools to treat children like they were adults in the workplace, I have another objection to these arguments. They always seem to make huge assumptions about what workplaces are like. While there are no doubt workplaces where you can pop out to the loo whenever you like, it is simply not the case that this is a universal rule. As a teacher, I don’t have any freedom to go off to the toilet during lessons. Plenty of other jobs involve constant activity or constant supervision of people or property. You can’t just leave a factory production line, or a queue of customers in a shop, whenever you feel like it. I would be here forever listing jobs, from brain surgeon to bus driver, where people cannot always go to the loo when they want. I complain often enough about silly opinions about teaching from people who have never worked in a classroom, but it is even worse when they have apparently never worked anywhere but places (presumably mainly offices) where people can use the facilities whenever they like.

Teachers are not monsters inconveniencing children for the sake of it. Restrictions on access to the toilets are in place for reasons regarding children’s best interests, and if you don’t understand those reasons your opinion on the matter is worthless.