James Porter, the headmaster of a private school, has been convicted over the death of a three year old child who fell from some playground steps and died. The implications of this monstrous and truly idiotic ruling are that soon visits to the playground will become a thing of the past unless the students are wearing safety helmets and body armour and are supervised by a team of lawyers at all times.
It is a tragedy that a young child died after jumping down a few stairs but that is just the way life is… sometimes it ends in premature death for no good reason other that children are wont to act like children. That is sad but it is also not just no one’s fault, it is entirely acceptable as life has its casualties and to blame this teacher is truly, truly monstrous.
Of course it cannot have helped that James Porter made the supremely sensible but very politically politically incorrect statement that “[Children] need to learn how to move in any given situation in a way that will protect them from injury. If they don’t have that facility, if we simply wrap them in cotton wool, they will never learn that lesson.”
But never mind that everyone seems to agree that there was nothing unusually unsafe or in any way exceptional about this particular flight of steps, this man has been found guilty under some preposterous health and safety regulations regardless. We seem to be heading down the enervating and idiotic path blazed by the United States in which every mishaps has to be someone else’s fault regardless of common sense or natural justice. Appalling.
This is simply one of those things that has always happened and will always continue to happen. Blaming the teacher just makes it worse.
Even if we literally wrapped children in cotton wool until they were 18, there would still be the odd one who dies from choking on cotton wool.
Ah, this will be because he ran a private school, not a state one. We all know that adults responsible for children should be regulated by the state, and that private schools don’t even have to follow the national curriculum, etc.
I don’t see something like this happening in the US, where the average jury is less likely to harbour as much foaming hatred for private schools, people with enough money to afford them, etc. I think this is class and money hatred, not the litiginous society per se.
Perry,
Actually no, not the USA, think more Sweden. In Sweden they have a policy called something like “vision zero” which amounts to the idea that accidents never happen and the avowed aim is to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero on Swedish roads.
Well, I wish to tell the Swedes that somewhere on the roads of the UK is a perhaps still a Ford Transit with a Nick shaped dent in it. I got a hell of a lot of bruising but the boys and gals at the QE in Gateshead put me together OK. I felt sorriest for the driver. He was in shock from the noise of the impact but I was 17 and ended-up OK. A subsequent police investigation concluded that I was crossing a 60 limit road on a foggy evening to go to the pub and that was all there was to say about the matter. It was an accident. I, at the time, was just too unconscious to feel shock. You know that horrible feeling when you’re groping around and the thing you feel is a white line. I was off school for ten days but seeing as the van was doing 60 (it was overtaking) at the time it could’ve been much, much worse. My elbow took the wing mirror off and it was months before it stopped aching but that wing mirror was totalled.
Reading the coverage of this case, I came across a reference to “unsupervised steps”.
I’m sorry? Unsupervised steps? Unsupervised steps? WTF?
O tempora, O mores.
Madness
As others have said. Accidents have always happened and it scares the pants off me when I think about some of the accidents I had in the 60’s and 70’s.
I remember one at boarding school where my close friend tripped and fell head long down a long flight of stairs. He was concussed and had a nasty cut to his face. Later in the same week he cut his foot open on some glass while playing football. He was just one of those accident prone people. In todays world the whole staff room would have ended up in jail.
More madness (of much lesser import) I heard a story on the radio today about a guy who was investigated by the police and cautioned ’cause he pinched some girl’s bum. If she did not like it she should have just smacked his face. Why involve the police in this petty nonsense?
Yes utter madness, but as we know, it’s the way things are going.
I’ve been hanging on to this little snippet for a while now in the hope it may be handy. Perhaps now is the time.
I heard on Radio 5 a while back that those in charge of producing our Highway Code, that little document you’d better get aquainted with before taking a vehicle on the highways, are trying to expunge the word
ACCIDENT, as in Road Traffic Accident, from it!!!
Henceforth nothing is a piece of misfortune, where no-one is to blame.
Now it has to be someones fault.
Preferably Chargeable, fineable and sueable.
Especially the finable…
Much as I am tempted to agree with Perry, I can’t help but notice that the child in question was three years old and playing in a playground where the environment included ‘a 13 step staircase’ – 13 steps is about ten feet.
It just seems that this might not be so entirely ridiculous as it sounds. That’s a big drop for a very young child.
Alice Bachini-Smith got it dead right. If the state wants control and power, it needs to arrogate to itself the right to dish out blame. No matter what happens, someone somehow will be found to take legal responsibility. When people use the term “nanny state”, they mean to be funny, sarcastic, flippant almost. The reality is quite scary, however.
Gth column,
I was probably sleepwalking (Gawd knows, my wife was only awoken by the outrageous noise and the fact I made a somewhat demented and indeed somewhat deranged attempt to urinate in the kitchen sink – I was not firing on all cylinders). But it was bad and I was forgiven (well it could’ve been much worse) and I had awoken in pool of my own blood because I’d fallen down the stairs. It was hell to get that out of the carpet. Anyhow, I took a 5 metre swallow dive and landed on my chin (the scar is permanent – but rather cool in a way – though the blood was something else – especially in the dark) and the only reason I didn’t break my back was that my scaphoids broke earlier. I presented to a consultant bone guy who had me plastered up by a nurse and sent home. Now this was at the Manchester Royal Infirmary were I suspect they get all manner of injuries but I was still special and they had students in to gawp – bilateral scaphoid fracture, never heard of it!
I am, of course, a theoretical physicist, and having six weeks in plaster I figured out how to shower and how to stick a cheap digital watch to my left cast. I figured other things but quite frankly that is none of your business. Though I did figure how to type and mouse and I guess I can tell y’all about that.
I am listening to Johnnie Cash – When The Man comes Around.
His real crime is ‘being unaware of Health & Safety guidelines’ and speaking the truth.
Kiss goodbye to playtime, parents.
Nick M,
In Sweden they have a policy called something like “vision zero” which amounts to the idea that accidents never happen and the avowed aim is to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero on Swedish roads.
Yet Swedish roads are nothing like as closely monitored or as injury-free as British ones… Must be all those unlicensed elks.
Yes Sweden is some ways LESS regulated than other Western nations. It government spending is very high – although oddly enough it was (even as percentage of the economy) only half British levels when Harold Macmillan wrote his “Middle Way” book praising it back in the 1930’s.
As for the perversion of tort (and other) law.
It applies to government schools as well – hence the decline of school trips (demands for insurance and other such) and to all public events (hence the decline of these events). The perversion of American law (that has often turned both the civil and criminal courts into part of the entertainment industy – with no connection to the traditional princples of law) has come to Britain (and come here hard).
It even applies to people climbing in trees on someone’s land – even if they are not guests.
The “legal fiction of the invitee”. So someone can say “keep out” and yet still be responsible for the accidents of someone on their property.
“But this was not a civil suit, this headmaster was hit with criminal stuff”.
Both the civil and criminal law are becomming absurd.
Justice (embodied in the traditional principles of law) may still exist (in the mind of God for example), but one can not count on finding it in a civil or a criminal court room.
It is not possible to completely protect people, children, or adults, all the time in all circumstances. I suspect we will find life increasingly stifling and less worth living as the increasingly fascist state continues to attempt to regulate us towards this end amongst others.
What’s more it is not the states right or duty to do so despite the bleating of the sheeple every time there is a flood that they didn’t bother to insure against or some other problem.
I don’t doubt the matter would have been handled very differently if the school had been state run.
The child fell down some steps. Children do that. Sadly in this case it was fatal, but shit does happen.
Sunfish comments:
1) What was he actually prosecuted for? I don’t see anything in the Torygraph or the BBC that would support charging with manslaughter or negligent homicide.
2) One adult for 40 or more children is a little thin. If it were my kid, I’d be bothered that there were insufficient adults on the playground with the kids.
3) The head injury, according to the evaluating pathologist, was “relatively trivial.” As in, cause of death was pneumonia, possibly resistant to antibiotics. Now, I can see pneumonia being aggravated by increased intracranial pressure screwing with breathing. And a “trivial” head injury in an adult can be a severe traumatic brain injury in a child.
3) It’s IMHO relevant (and not mentioned in either the BBC, DT, Daily Post, or Daily Mail web coverage) how long the responsible adults waited before taking him to a hospital. Hell, it’s not even clear what signs or symptoms of distress were evident that would tell Mom, Dad, or Teacher that Kian needed medical help. Children fall when they play. Someone characterized this fall as being similar to falling off of household furniture. That, in the absence of other factors, would not suggest to me the need for emergency medical care. That being said, the Daily Mail article says that EMS was called and Kian was admitted through the emergency department, which suggests that the school staff did respond properly once they perceived a problem. That means, AIUI, that any finding of negligence would have to hinge on whether they failed to perceive a problem that a “reasonable person” would have seen sooner.
It’s a tragedy. It sucks when children die. Not every tragedy is a crime, though. Sometimes, shit happens.
While it is absurd that the H&S ricebowlers were all over this, it is no surprise as that is their function, just as a cockroach will walk across your freshly cut sandwich.
The real worry here is that this ever made it to court. Further, that a jury would convict.
Four layers of failure have occurred.
Parents. H&S. CPS. Jury.
The child was just being a child and Mr Porter was not to blame in any way.
The fact that the parents felt “relief and satisfaction” over this is disgusting, even taking into account the distortions of grief. They also are guilty of using the term “duty of care”, which in any rational world would result in a 6 month supervision order for diminished responsibility.
They are not content with destroying this man, they want a second pound of flesh, it seems, as part of a further private prosecution. “Scumbags” hardly expresses the depth of my contempt for these people.
This kind of nanny-state nonsense is why this book is Number One in the US Bestseller List:
The Dangerous Book For Boys
It’s about letting boys be boys again.