Whitgift: Keen on peacocks; less so on anti-bullying

In the end, it’s the callousness of the brush-off that shocks. The lack of care…

Our son was bullied. Badly. He has physically moved on from the scene of the crimes, but it hasn’t left him, or us. The issues still linger and the anger at his treatment resurfaces regularly.

I hadn’t been in touch with the school for a couple of years, but the after effects last longer than that, so we attempted to get back in touch with them. We wanted more from them. Not sure what that would be, but this was a problem in which they were deeply culpable. A conversation would be a start.

That attempt to re-engage went as far as two emails, before the school sent a letter to cut us off: The boy had left. Not their problem. No further correspondence. Do not contact us again on this matter.

That, it turns out, is what his school Whitgift in Croydon, south London, is like. Not so much caring school, worried for the welfare of a child. More profit centre, keen on retaining fees, certainly not an institution determined to include, to educate and to protect. That is an institution that is put in charge of people’s children. That’s how they treat their duty of care.

Can you tell your mum to stop changing her lipstick so often?

Why?

Cos my dick’s looking like a rainbow

(playground taunt)

Whitgift is a daunting institution. For a child entering at the age of 10 (a year earlier than normal for secondary) and one entering from a small state school, it is especially so. Once our son joined, the next 20 months became a catalogue of spiteful bullying, physical attacks and personal abuse. He was damaged. And a large part of me knows that his school stood and watched — and failed him. That in itself was an inevitable outcome of the bullying culture of the school.

It was in the playground, in the classroom, in his text messages and on social media. It was every day and it was as nasty as it was needless and unjustified. His only crime was to be the youngest in the school, to be from a different background (’12 Years A Slave? That’s your life, that is’) and, worst of all, to show that it got to him. It upset him and it worried him and he reacted and that was fuel to them. To get a reaction meant they would try harder to get another one.

He never ducked, he went back to that school every day — his acceptance that this was his lot was both strangely noble and heart-breaking. Taken in isolation, each incident doesn’t seem to add up to much, but the knowledge that, every day, there would be something else, some new taunt dragged him down. They took a bright, sociable, enthusiastic boy, and turned the lights out.

They were punching me and taking pictures to put on Instagram.

Reported attack on the school bus home

The problem, the school reckoned, wasn’t with the bullies. It was with the bullied. He wasn’t fitting in. He was finding it difficult to make friends. He needed better social skills. He was the issue. Not the ones who name called, punched him, stole his watch, his dignity and his self-esteem. They were normal. He was the weird kid.

When I protested that they were fostering a bullying culture, they were adamant they were not, and then turned the conversation, once again to how they could help him ‘fit in’. It, far too late, dawned on me that their energies were just as much concentrated on managing me as they were on ‘solving’ the problem. Keeping a lid on it was everything — reputation management was key. After all, with any school, reputation is all — in the state or private sector, schools are judged by demand. That defines their status and, consequently, their success.

What’s more, they were shifting the blame. His failure to fit in made him bullied, rather than the bullying made him not want to fit in. The school equivalent of creating a deserving, contributory victim. He was asking for it.

#Ur a scrapeout [abortion]

Text message

This is where it gets systemic. The boy gets bullied. The school isolates the victim and makes it clear there’s a pecking order. It spirals until it gets unbearable.

Whitgift has a code of conduct around bullying but they don’t seem to have read their own document. They promised a response within two days of an issue being raised. We mention a physical attack, they take over a week to respond. We tell them we’ve found him self-harming. It takes ten days.

Of course, I complain. I complain until the school complains that I’m complaining too much. And if I complain more, they would ‘re-consider [my] son’s place in the school’.

And then I begin to wonder…

Because I ask what the punishments for the bullies are. Whitgift won’t tell me. They hint that there’s a privacy issue. I ask again, and they refuse but it becomes clear there have been no punishments for the bullies. In the meantime, they start to complain about the standard of our lad’s work and his punctuality. ‘How would your work be’, I say, ‘If I spent your working day taunting you’. They don’t answer. ‘How punctual would you be for a lesson where you’re offered no protection from bullies?’ Again, no answer. Meanwhile, the punishments for the bullied boy pile up. No homework means a detention. Fair enough — but not when a bruising attack goes unpunished.

Then I realise — at Whitgift, each punishment has ‘points’ attached. Those points are adding up — if he gets to 12 in a calendar year, they can ask him to leave. They want the victim out. It’s easier to get rid of him, in the singular, than the bullies, in the plural. Deliberate or not (and they keep more fees this way, it’s a form of constructive dismissal.

The bullies’ parents were even shoddier. I would hope that, if the situations were reversed, I’d front up, talk to my offspring, discuss it with the parents. Not these ones. Not these who’d been to our house for dinner. They blanked us. We were social lepers.

The school and the parents, deliberate or not, collude in the illusion that the problem with bullies lies with the bullied. By complaining about their treatment, they spoil the smooth running of the school, they break the illusion of a well-run establishment, hard but fair. Give them a problem, give them something that actually tests whether they genuinely have the right skills to be in charge of children and they fall into the line of least resistance. They can isolate him as a weakling, isolate his parents as troublemakers and by seeing it as a problem to be hidden, not one to be tackled, they can ruin a young boy’s life. I can’t forgive that.

Go home and suck your dad’s dick. He’s a homo

Text message

It wasn’t just this heightened tolerance of bullying either. The teachers weren’t above joining in. His maths teacher was hardly encouraging intellectual curiosity — calling pupils ‘Huggies’ or ‘Pampers’, and refusing to answer questions: “I’m not answering that it’s a stupid question”.

His sports teacher mocked his hockey skills (state school background, remember) telling him in front of a collection of teammates and parents:

“you play like a pansy, no one would want you in their team”.

We raised it quietly at parents evening to another member of the PE team months later. The teacher culprit cornered our son the next day: “the conversation that your Mum said happened, never happened did it?” “No it didn’t sir”.

We asked him if he actually remembered the incident. He did. “So why did you agree with the teacher?”

“Because I didn’t want a detention and he was holding a hockey stick.”

He’s in a new school now, and bullying isn’t his problem. Self esteem is. His work has suffered. He is damaged. We took him to an anti-bullying workshop — a dusty church hall full of broken children where they strip them down to look for what’s broken, psychologically. Our boy was the one they worried most about. He’s reluctant to accept therapy, he’s determined to shut off anything that can be construed as weakness, as an opening for more bullies. He’s over-achieving in adolescence and trying to make sense of everything else, while wondering what he’s angry about and why he’s dissatisfied. Its stressful, its painful and its wholly avoidable.

It’s a subject which makes him feel isolated, but, ironically, I come across many parents who have had the same issues with the same school. Bullying back by institutional denial and blame. A Flashman approach to the issue. It builds character.

I re-started the conversation as I watched him struggle as he enters the GCSE years. The issues he’s still dealing with are rooted in South Croydon. So I get back in touch. I want them to admit culpability, to grow up. To man up, in their termnology. But they can’t engage. The school of bullies can’t look me in the eye.

In many ways, Whitgift is a fine school. Good results. Great drama and music. Excellent sport. But it’s inhumane, uncaring and one-eyed. They care about the institution, not the child.

And they won’t even reply to an email. It’s too much effort for them to even discuss it.