It is strange sometimes how you can be part of a decision making process, but then be gobsmacked when the decision is put into effect. This has happened to me with respect to our Church School, next to Holy Trinity.
We had an OFSTED inspection about three years ago. These are dreaded by all schools, but on this occasion we did very well. I am and was at the time the Chair of Governors at the time, and so I was very much involved in the whole process. The only area where we were found wanting was in the area of the children's safety. The school is old - it goes back to the eighteen forties and it is situated on Wimbledon Common on a very small site. In some places the school walls are directly accessible from the Common. In another part of the school there is only a waist high metal fence between the Common and the school grounds where the nursery has lessons and plays. It is these that worried the OFSTED inspectors. The question they put to us was: can you guarantee that no child can be abducted from this part of the school during the course of the school day? All that needs to happen is for someone to bend over the metal fence, grab a child and make off.
Huh? The suggestion seemed bizarre. It has never happened in the past, why should it happen now? The inevitable reply: 'Well, it has happened at other schools.' And like other schools we have family situations where estranged parents might well seek to take their own children despite restraining orders or complete banns. They might even take them away to a foreign country.
The chief inspector was so concerned that he sent a letter to our Director of Education about it all. The governors of the school had to do something about it. There was no alternative.
Up to this point we can all nod our heads and say, well it is 'all Health and Safety gone mad', but at the end of the day it is the children's safety that is paramount. The decision has to be made. So let's do it.
Then the decision is put into effect. The first I heard about it was when a friend of mine came up to me yesterday and said, 'Look at that, they're penning the kids in.' I looked up to the nursery area, and there was a wicker fence of about six and a half feet high all around the area that had been protected by the waist high metal fence. It did seem that the kids were being corralled into the entrance and lesson/play area. They could not see the Common any more. There was very much the sense of a transition from an open space into a contained space. The wicker fence was fine, beautiful in its own way, but the sense was definitely one of confinement, rather than freedom or interaction with the Common.
I went round to the headteacher. 'Did we agree to all this. I can't remember.' Patiently and courteously he took me back to the OFSTED report and its recommendations. 'Yes. We discussed all this at the Governors, and we voted to do all that was necessary.' By this time I had calmed down.
The Head and his staff had done what they had been told to do. There was no alternative. And they had done it in keeping with the environmental and aesthetic ethos of the school. There could be no criticism at all.
However, I am left with a distinctly queasy feeling about it all. We did what had to be done, but what we have done has inevitably diminished the children's enjoyment and experience of the Common. We have added to the pervasive culture of suspicion that afflicts our culture. It is sad.
For me, it is sad, because I don't really believe all the rhetoric. But by the same token, I don't believe that there is any room to take up an heroic stand against the bureaucrats and apparatchiks who have given the safeguarding agenda a life of its own. It is not my job that is on the line. I do not have to deal with these people everyday of my working life. In this respect I have it easy.
Part of the doctrine of Original Sin is the idea of structural sin. This is the sin we all participate in, simply by virtue of being a part of a community. The wicker fence is an example. It is sin because it falls far short of the purposes of God, and it is sin because we collude with the forces that have brought it into being. We can only put our hands up and ackowledge our part in it. The sin is compounded if we shy away from responsibility. 'It's not my fault, gov. Rules is rules.'
But putting our hands up is important. By acknowledging our part, we do keep ourselves sensitive to what are the good purposes of God. We are more alert of future examples of structural sin, and when we find that these do cut across our neighbour's vulnerability, we can act. Desensitisation to sin is a long road, a road that leads to a place that none of us wants to go to.
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