Small minds will hobble the Big Society

How can public spiritedness prevail when minor transgressions or even simple kindnesses can be inflated into major crimes?

Imagine that you are a well-respected deputy head teacher who has proudly devoted your career of 41 years to the education of primary school children. Your daughter is a teacher, too, and your little granddaughter is in your class.

There is an unruly seven-year-old boy in your school who is frequently uncontrollable and violent. One day, he goes particularly berserk, and you are called to deal with his behaviour. He is thrashing around hysterically, and you physically restrain his arms to calm him down: in the course of the tussle, your hand makes contact with his face. It is alleged that you have smacked him on the face, or so the boy says when he recounts the incident to his mother some days later.

Soon after, you are summarily marched off the school premises, to be charged with assault. Your prosecution takes five months and costs the taxpayer thousands of pounds. The magistrates clear you of blame, but the damage is done.

This is no fiction: it is what happened to Royden Cope, the 63-year-old deputy head of St Bartholomew’s School in Great Harwood, Lancashire. And although he was acquitted last week, he is still suspended from his teaching job pending an “internal inquiry”. His eight-year-old granddaughter had to leave the school because of taunts about her grandfather. It seems to me that those who pursued this prosecution should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

I do not want to return to the days of harsh corporal punishment, and nor does Mr Cope, as he made clear. But the pendulum has swung so far the other way that dedicated teachers are being held, in extremely testing circumstances, to a standard of perfection to which no real human being could adhere: indeed, they are often effectively helpless in response to pupils’ own violence. The blinkered machinations of the state have not only let Mr Cope down, but also that disruptive seven-year-old boy, for who will dare to restrain his flailing tantrums now? Those who might have helped him to change will retreat from him. Instead of receiving a clear signal from a united authority, he has learnt that he can wreak exciting damage by exploiting a divided one.

Unfortunately, Mr Cope’s case is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a confused bureaucracy which – terrified of incurring blame itself – has begun punishing honourable people. Take another case last week, presided over by Judge Clifford Bellamy of the High Court, sitting in Coventry, in which it was found that social workers had failed to inform a couple who had adopted a seven-year-old girl that the child may have suffered serious sexual abuse. The couple had said they did not want to adopt such a child, due to the very specific challenges this trauma can pose.

As the unwitting couple attempted to get the increasingly uncontrollable, troubled child to stick to their rules at home, they were themselves accused by social workers of “torturing” her and “being high-risk abusive parents”. When the girl made a false accusation of assault against her adoptive father, both parents were arrested and the mother – a teacher of 20 years’ standing – was briefly banned from all contact with children. Two people who had tried to help were trapped in a nightmare that might have been designed by Kafka.

I can easily think of other cases in which public-spiritedness has attracted heavy censure – such as those of the experienced teachers Martin Davis and Heather Wolfson, each of them suspended for kindly pastoral care which included offering a lift home when a pupil was left stranded. Or that of Dr David Drew, a highly regarded paediatric consultant, who was sacked by Walsall Manor Hospital for “gross misconduct and insubordination” after raising difficult questions about the proper safeguarding of children on his ward, and emailing a well-known Christian prayer to staff as inspiration. The crime of all these people, it seems, was to care too much.

David Cameron speaks warmly of a “Big Society”, which volunteers help to run. Our Government wants more families to adopt vulnerable children, more high-powered graduates in teaching. But a powerful current runs counter to all this. It is concerned with box-ticking rather than morality, with inflating minor transgressions or even simple kindnesses into major crimes. It seems to take joy in parading “respectable” professional people through tribunals, disciplinary panels and courts. There is a zealous whiff of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to it, although our judges often see it for the lunacy it is. By then, however, lives and careers have already been wrecked.

Mr Cameron, take note: we will have no Big Society when small-mindedness is given such terrifyingly free rein.

Rejoice! Our exam results are worse

Good news from the A-level results: the proportion of A or A* grades has fallen for the first time in 21 years, due to “changes in the marking system”. This does not mean that this year’s school-leavers are any stupider or less diligent than last year’s, just as 21 unbroken years of grade inflation did not mean that they were steadily getting brighter.

Grades will have to deflate some distance, however, before they return to where they were in the late 1980s, when I sat my three A-levels, and it was possible for clever students to be happy enough with B and C grades, even a D was nothing terrible, and plenty of people failed outright and resat their exams. As a result, it was possible to see quite quickly where you hadn’t done enough work, or perhaps just weren’t as good at a given topic as you had imagined.

There were advantages to this system, which doled out reality checks like cod liver oil. Some say it didn’t buoy up children’s confidence – but, when everyone is marked harder, there is correspondingly less belief that lower grades constitute a catastrophic failure. Now, young people have to struggle for many years to differentiate themselves from the crowd: for the top jobs, they are expected to provide a clutch of A* grades, a First or 2:1 from university, and even a postgraduate qualification or evidence of lengthy, unpaid work experience. It’s exhausting, prolonged and incredibly expensive: that’s the real cost of inflation.

My Mayfair hotel spree shame

News of the Scrabble player who was caught cheating in a lower level of the US national championship has travelled worldwide. Luckily for him, his name cannot be revealed as he is a minor. The youth was spotted concealing a spare pair of blank tiles, which can be used as wild cards to gain extra points.

I once did something vaguely similar as a child, playing a slow-moving game of Monopoly with my siblings. Wrapped in a rug, I stationed myself near the poorly guarded Monopoly bank, and concealed large amounts of stolen cash under my blanket, enough to finance heady hotel-buying binges on Mayfair. The others found out soon enough – after a while, like a reckless felon, I made no effort to conceal my spending power – and made me return my purchases.

The truth is that cheating at board games, a bit like doping in athletics, quickly grows boring for everyone. It is only the belief in genuine competition that makes the game worth playing. And that is also why, although nothing sounds gentler than an evening playing Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, such living-room sports so often end in howling, rowing mayhem.