Le regole del bagno creano ansia per periodi, dicono gli alunni della scuola
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kv8vxzn99o
di DamascusNuked
Le regole del bagno creano ansia per periodi, dicono gli alunni della scuola
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kv8vxzn99o
di DamascusNuked
14 commenti
She’s home schooled as she cannot go to the toilet when she likes? How’s she going to get a job? Teachers can’t go whenever they want
Edit – they are kids. They will look for any excuse to get out of class. If it’s urgent they can go.
Edit- clearly many of you guys haven’t been in a school in a while.
> “Sometimes we would have to ask in front of the class and we would be denied, sometimes we would have to tell them why we needed to go to the toilet,” she said.
> “It was hugely embarrassing, you would toy with yourself [as to] whether you had the confidence to put up your hand and ask. It’s a big feeling of potential judgement.”
> Holly said she and her friends had “bled through our underwear”, adding: “One of my friends bled through onto a chair and had to do a walk of shame. It was one of her first periods and people made fun of her for weeks.”
Aside from any potential issues regarding students behaviour in toilets, and I know that in lots of places behavioural issues have gotten worse since COVID for a variety of reasons, there surely must be something that can be done to deal with the stigma around menstruation. I get that boys this age are often immature and plenty of kids in general this age will make fun of you for pretty much anything and everything, but even when I was at school it was generally understood that menstruation was just a biological thing that happened, and the menstrual cycle itself was part of our GCSE curriculum for biology – there was always *some* focus on making sure, through these biology lessons, sex ed and PSHE lessons, and through teachers trying to stamp down on bullying, that everyone knew making fun of periods wasn’t acceptable, and I went to a catholic school that until something like 2015 still had rules explicitly banning any “homosexual activity”, in a pretty solidly conservative area.
Even when I was at university I had a friend of mine, more than a few times, get embarrassed and ask me or her other friends if she was leaking through her trousers because even then, as an 18 year old, she was still too shy to leave lecture theatres or seminars to change a pad. And these were lectures and seminars for an English literature course where a solid 90% of the students, and a majority of professors, were other women.
Menstruation is still such a massive social stigma for girls, and it feels like it’s gotten even worse – potentially down to how COVID and keeping young people inside during some of their formative years wasn’t good for their social skills or general interpersonal stuff, potentially down to society in general becoming more creepingly authoritarian, particularly with how it deals with children, whereby simultaneously kids are an uncontrollable menace that need to be punished but also don’t receive any help or support from parents and where teachers are too overworked to do any more than the simple requirements of their jobs.
I had this conversation with a teacher on a open day recently .
What they set in school is not relative to university or work, even the military isn’t as strict as it once was.
The teacher was still trying to fight the corner that being a dick was the right way
There are a few things incorrectly linked together in this article.
First, school is an age where girls pretty much all go through puberty and have to deal with their first periods. That needs to be dealt with a lot better. Considering what an incredibly high proportion of staff in schools are women, I’m amazed how badly managed that is, to be honest. Maybe they’re all too old to remember their own puberty.
Schools have toilet rules because too many kids took the piss and basically used “sir, I need the toilet” as an excuse to skive off lessons they didn’t like. Kids’ bladders aren’t that small, in general you should be able to manage when you go so you can go to the toilet in breaks. This should be managed on a per child basis (i.e. if you do it every lesson it’s suspicious and you should be denied, if it’s occasional then benefit of the doubt), but society has got so much more easily offended and litigious so you’d have mums complaining that their kid wasn’t allowed out when someone else’s was if you did that.
This kid also sounds like she was basically using the toilet to skive off (sorry, ‘regulate’) and that her neurodivergence made the school environment difficult for her to deal with – which would be true even if the school had a sensible toilet policy (because going off to the toilet for half a lesson to ‘regulate’ would be against it anyway).
Another “this is a real problem because it’s a problem for girls” issue.
They shouldn’t be denying toilet access, because it’s a biological function and it’s wrong to do so. It’s not only a problem if you can frame it as affecting girls.
My place has a rule that kids shouldn’t need to go during lessons unless it’s an emergency…they’re 17
In my class we all know the routine
‘Can I go to the toilet’
‘Can you wait 20 minutes or is it an emergency?’
‘It’s an emergency’
‘Off you go—-if the principal asks I put up a fight’
I started my period in primary school so my teacher had told me to use the staff toilet, the first time I went I got shouted at by the headteacher for using it and just went back to class without going.
Some teachers are just on weird power trips
I had a teacher in primary school when I was like 7 said I couldn’t use the toilet. I was busting I really had to go there was no way I could wait. I ended up just going on the seat because she wouldn’t let me. My parents were so angry at the school, after that she never said no again anyways…
I’ve developed Crohns in my twenties, but can only imagine how stressful it would have been to have at school.
Teachers need to understand pupils’ needs. Boys and girls, ill or not.
At my kids school they get three toilet passes a term for use in lesson time. If they want more they have to ask their head of year. Neither of them will drink in the morning or during the school day so they are often dehydrated which can’t help learning.
When I was in school a few years ago we were only allowed to go in breaks, and because of this it meant sometimes you didn’t get the chance to go because of queues.
I understand it’s a safe guarding issue, and I know people personally who went to the toilets just to mess around, so I do feel bad for the teachers as well, who don’t want to risk getting in trouble because of some badly behaved students.
But if you have to go you have to go. My school locked the toilets inbetween lessons, even the disabled one, and this meant kids were throwing up in the hallways every winter when the vomiting bug came round, and people with ibs had to miss like 15 mins of a lesson just to walk to the sixth form building’s toilets which were unlocked. It’s really inhumane and ever since leaving school I’ve been able to go whenever I’ve needed it.
In one of my schools we had open toilets (idk the word) where the cubicles were in the hallway and not in a separate room, and that was probably the best for behaviour. If it’s a one off I think kids should be allowed to go, and I also think adults shouldn’t be shamed for needing it, too. I know a few times my teachers had to call someone from the office to come and watch us for a few mins so they could go. It’s bad for someone’s health to have to hold it and only go once during the school day, I know so many people who had near constant utis because of this, and people who barely drank.
You don’t know why someone’s asking to go. Maybe they got their period, maybe they have diarrhea or feel sick, maybe they just had pe and had to drink, so they need to go.
Kids deserve toilet access when genuinely needed, but teachers also deserve better support, so that they’re able to let kids leave.
Teacher here, although not in the UK. I try and be as fair as I can be with toilet trips- I’ll generally say yes to most students unless it’s in the first or last 10min of class, or I’m giving instructions for a task/answers for said task. I also try and make sure there’s only one boy and one girl out at a time- I’ve had classes in the past where several of them went out at the same time only to then be found talking for ages to friends near the toilets. Then they’d come back in, having missed parts of the lesson and expect you to stop what you’re doing with the students who actually stay in class and explain things to them.
You’ve also got the issue of some students simply straight up using ANY excuse to get out of things they don’t like. I had a boy last year who was smart but lazy and hated writing. He’d typically use either sharpening a pencil or toilet breaks as a reason to skip over entire writing tasks before simply copying answers down from the board. I ended up having to police him specifically (I usually required that he at a minimum started at least 1-2 questions before he did anything else) to keep him on task and actually putting any effort in.
Believe me, I don’t want to police my students and will always let GENUINE emergency toilet trips happen, but some level of policing is an unfortunate necessity when it comes to students.
I’m probably going to sound like a negative Nancy here but let’s go:
For the majority (highlight, majority) of people, toilet rules like this are honestly necessary to keep discipline in your lessons because otherwise I know for a fact 70% of people would abuse going to the toilet and take long breaks just to get out of lesson. In my school there’s also historically been crowding in toilets during lesson times.
It’s the minority that ruin it for the majority, but it kinda makes sense: you are VERY much able to go to the toilet in-between lessons, even in the more stricter schools without being late to lesson, and at breaks, and those with conditions are permitted to go to the toilet whenever.
The rule should definitely be exercised on a more case by case basis, but people calling for it to be scrapped entirely have no idea how a school environment actually is like (as a GCSE pupil myself).
We also have to remember for most exams you aren’t allowed to go to the toilet. With others, there’s a 15 minute window. Just putting that out there…
It is genuinely insane that this is occurring, obscene even, I get some people may abuse the system but this is too far. A lot of schools seem to do this, my school for example also issued “toilet passes” to students who needed the toilet. And I remember when I was in year eight, the entire class collectively had to coerce the teacher to let a student go. The UK experienced the biggest student protest in history over access to school toilets in 2023, so it’s not like this issue has just been exposed. For a girl on her period to be denied bathroom access is just despicable, we need this debated in parliament. This sort of thing belongs in Japanese pornography not British education.