Even St Trinians allowed Movie Cameras in School
There are a couple of rather complex problems afflicting schools, but one rather simple and obvious solution.
The first problem is how Ofsted, the schools’ inspectorate, is able to establish an accurate picture of life in the classroom when their very presence makes the whole situation very stressful and unnatural. The schools themselves would have been preparing for an Ofsted visit. It’s likely that teachers would have been distracted from their important classroom duties by the worry and strain of letting the school down with a poor classroom performance in front of an inspector.
This seems part of a much more general problem in that those who manage or govern have to make decisions based on an accurate knowledge of what’s happening in their sphere of responsibility, or more prosaically, the shop floor. For a number of reasons, mainly concerned with the human condition, accurate information doesn’t travel very well from the bottom to the top of an organisation. And sometimes the top doesn’t even want to receive it.
The second problem is related to the fallout from child abuse. In the bad old days, children were to be seen but not heard and so no-one believed the child who was brave enough to complain of abuse, sexual and/or violent. Things are thankfully different these days but as ever, the pendulum never hangs straight down, but swings from one extreme to the other. So the new starting point in any complaint is that children are always believed. The onus would therefore seem to be on an accused teacher to prove their innocence, a principle at variance with English law and indeed human rights under article 11 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Any complaint goes on record, so a teacher’s reputation could be destroyed by a maliciously false or disingenuous complaint. Then again, there may well be genuine cases of abuse, so what’s to be done to establish what really occurred to give peace of mind?
The simple solution to the above problems is a video camera in every classroom. It’s one of those things that will surely come, but hopefully more organically than being precipitated by a tragic event that could have been foreseen by the use of a camera. It seems that no one can be bothered to go through the (admittedly tedious) process of establishing a secure monitoring and archiving system, and indeed deciding when it’s safe to overwrite potential video evidence. It seems strange that there should be oversensitivity regarding controlled and official video monitoring of children and teachers, particularly when the intelligence services of the UK and US are alleged to have been working together to turn everyday smart electronic products into in-situ monitoring devices: Classroom electronic visual display aids for example?
