A former headteacher of Northwold Primary School (London E5) sacked for admonishing her own child for trying to grab hand sanitiser (having previously managed to get it in his eye) has just won an unfair dismissal case.
The Mail has the story:
Shelly-Ann Malabver-Goulbourne was trying to get her three-year-old to stop playing with a hand sanitiser in her office when she used two fingers to attract his attention, an employment tribunal heard.
The incident was witnessed by the teacher in charge of child safety, who accused her of hurting her son and completed a “cause for concern” form to report a “safeguarding incident”.
Ms. Bhagwandas reported witnessing the Head smack her son on the hand, that the child had been crying and that she had “pacified” him. Ms. Malabver-Goulbourne was suspended and a disciplinary investigation launched.
It led to the Head being suspended and the police called.
Even the police, normally so keen to throw unlimited resources at supporting anyone who makes an accusation, however unfounded or mischievous, deemed this to require no further action.
Although officers ruled that her actions were “reasonable chastisement” by a parent, Ms. Malabver-Goulbourne was found guilty of gross misconduct [by the Trust] and sacked.
The Trust told her that “whether a tap or otherwise, this was unnecessary physical contact with a pupil, which constitutes an assault” and a breach of policies and statutory guidance.
She is in line for compensation after an employment judge concluded there was no evidence that she had committed “physical chastisement or an assault” and ruled her dismissal unfair.
Employment Judge Julia Jones said the school’s code of conduct does not prohibit all physical contact between pupils and teachers and pointed out that as a parent of pupils that would be a difficult rule for the Head to abide by.
Upholding her claim for unfair dismissal, the judge said the [Arbor Academy] Trust “had sufficient evidence… that she was trying to prevent injury to her child and addressing his behaviour”.
Small consolation to the Headteacher concerned, having discovered that a single member of staff’s complaint, however trivial or misguided, could lead to the destruction of her career.
One wonders what the subtext was here – a personal vendetta perhaps, or maybe there’s a whole backdrop to this story that hasn’t been revealed. Or even, perhaps it was a procedure that ran away with itself and to save face it was pursued to the brutal end.
Interesting though to note that Ms. Bhagwandas appears as Deputy Head in a school newsletter dated January 10th 2022. According to the Telegraph the incident took place exactly one week later on January 17th 2022. Ms. Bhagwandas was subsequently listed on the school website on an undated page as “Acting Head of School”, and is named in that capacity on the Arbor Academy Trust’s Leadership page. She does not appear on the current school staff list (which doesn’t list a Deputy Head) but according to her LinkedIn page she is still Deputy Head at Northwold where she has worked since 2010.
The sacked headteacher was appointed in 2017.
Just as a general observation, denunciations for moral or religious misdemeanours and disloyalty or treachery have always been the tool of choice for individuals, organisations or governments to pursue feuds or get rid of inconvenient people, or just to feel the warm glow of righteousness that comes with condemning someone else.
What this sorry saga mostly tells you though is that, just as during Covid, never before in our so-called liberal democratic state supposedly built around individual freedoms has so much machinery been put in place to facilitate this sort of carry-on. One also wonders how much this incident cost. Hopefully, however, the Headteacher concerned will now be amply compensated.
No wonder there’s a shortage of heads.
Worth reading in full, or if you want the longer version try the Telegraph‘s coverage.
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Finally a picture on DS that doesn’t make me feel nauseous.
Don’t those elephants just look so happy and free? Contrast it with the picture below in the article about Austria with those disgusting, menacing, repressive stormtroopers harassing citizens for nothing more than going about their daily lives.
…
One lives more in one day than the other its entire life.
Lions are the very icon of freedom & living life to the fullest, even if they are lazy bastards.
Don’t worry I’m sure DS can come up with a picture of Bojo mounting a lion..
A pig surely? Spit roast with Cameron perhaps?
Oh god sorry, that’s just too much
“Of course, any new variant should be treated with extreme caution, “
I’m so tired of all this NIMBYism. Too many people are happy to swallow all of this crap – until it’s their problem. Yes of course it’s tragic that this stigma will hit Botswana hard but that’s because it’s all nonsense not because it’s an unfortunate truth.
“Of course, any new variant should be treated with extreme caution,“
They feel obliged to parrot this nonsense or they won’t be taken seriously. This is compliance bordering on complicity.
In France everyone is so absolutely petrified of the Omacron variant they’re breaking out the best Bordeaux for petit-déjeuner.. 😉
If an opponent can successfully stick “Omicron” to “O Macron” then Macron will lose the election, because being perceived as a great big pile of Dangerous Lergy is a terrible look for a campaigning politician, but there’s a long way to go. He hasn’t even started campaigning yet.
To right..
Never mind about Botswana – the tourist industry in Brentwood and Nottingham will be devastated!!
“Of course, any new variant should be treated with extreme caution”
Why? And why should the gunk be any less useless than it is?
How much more of this con game can the public absorb without twigging it’s a myth about a virus of no high consequence.
“Wearing masks here is compulsory and all shops/offices/banks have sanitising spray at the door and a guard to remind forgetful patrons.”
Sorry that you bought into the narrative. Now that they’ve spun your country into the fear campaign, you are stuck dealing with consequences. Maybe you should just pitch your tourism industry to the skeptics. I can promise that nobody on this site buys the story about this variant being created in Botswana anyway.
Certainly nobody here is going to be buying the hype and the panic responses.
Apart from “raye” and the few other trolls, who get paid to stalk this site.
Appears we have the Dr Jekyll “rayc” today:
“rayc
30 minutes ago
Well, the last part of the postcard sounds like the author is fully subscribed to the official agenda and more than happy to be fucked some more. Until this sort of Stockholm syndrome virus is eradicated from the brain of everyone on the planet, the pandemic will never end.”
I’d love to go to Botswana, but I’m not going until they allow me to go with a plain uncluttered face for all to see.
amanuensis, made a comment in another thread about what if there was a real threat from a novel highly infectious killer disease, (put to one side covid, we all know now it’s not as billed) but have a grown up debate.
21st century air travel is the best way to spread infectious disease around the planet within a few hours! That’s a fact, (if you accept the principles of germ theory).
Quarantine has been a tried & tested method for preventing transmission of disease for decades, I don’t find it unreasonable as a public health measure to limit travel & impose restrictions such as quarantine.
International air travel isn’t a human right, flying people around the world to protect the tourist sector of a country isn’t reason enough to spread disease, discuss as a grown up?
OK back to conspiracy theory, it’s too bloody late to stop covid now, even if you’re a believer, so let it rip.
I doubt it matters. 10%+ IFR rate, society completely collapses and the preppers take over, ‘elites’ go into their bunker and the army try and lock everything down, until they realise it’s hopeless and their families are dying also, at which point it’s everyman for himself.
I’m almost swayed by this response. Given the hysteria from covid I’d say an actual pandemic would result in anarchy, no matter how wonderful the plans were, and how many preparatory exercises were undertaken.
We probably shouldn’t worry so much about it and should just try to be happy.
But it was the media & psychologists that created that hysteria!
It doesn’t take much to close boarders, though the Tories make it look difficult, I admit.
Yours & Paul B’s, prognosis makes it look decidedly dystopian, which wasn’t the direction or context my post was meant to take FFS.
But don’t worry i’m in a better position than most to cope with the worst case scenario, 😉
The problem with that argument (which is certainly internally coherent) is that if you allow governments powers to act in an “emergency”, you will inevitably soon face an “emergency”.
As in this case, once you concede the point you make, the powers you allow will be abused in response to fatuous non-threats like a new “variant” of a globally endemic cold virus (or indeed covid generally).
Best imo to make it as hard as possible for them to exercise such powers, except in specific, localised and defined cases.
I doubt many people would want to live in my ideal world, because we wouldn’t have government, or international air travel.
In reality, it’s too late, government assumed parental responsibility over its citizens long ago.
My post was made purely in practical terms, excluding Hollywood scenarios, e.g. Paul B.
“I doubt many people would want to live in my ideal world, because we wouldn’t have government, or international air travel.”
I can’t imagine how a world would manage without a government of sorts – even ants have organisation. And international air travel is great – I certainly intend to make up for lost flying with all this money I’ve save up since March 2020! Ryanair Stansted to Helsinki £4 cheapest.
The problem with that argument is that it implies that the spread of disease is a bad thing.
Actually the spread of viruses and bacteria is a really good thing. I am sure that thanks to all the mixing and travelling the human immune system as a whole has never been more exercised or in better shape.
I agree.
Indeed, in an ecological sense pathogens have an important function, remove emotive societal moralistic arguments, you’re left with a natural process.
Buy a new car and have it stand in your drive for 20 years. Don’t drive it. After 20 years it is not fit to drive any more – all rubber pipes gone hard, the chemicals in electric components decomposed, brake fluid has absorbed water and the pistons have rusted solid. A car needs to be run and maintained, as does the human body – bacteria and viruses to keep us trained and topped up and in condition to tackle the tough ones.
“Actually the spread of viruses and bacteria is a really good thing. I am sure that thanks to all the mixing and travelling the human immune system as a whole has never been more exercised or in better shape.”
That’s true up to a point, mostly because we’ve long ago assimilated, and paid the blood price for doing so, all the really bad ones. A modern day equivalent of the Black Death or the diseases that the primitive societies of the New World were hit by when they were recontacted by the human mainstream after centuries of isolation would not be acceptable as just a route to immunity.
Hypothetically, such a new disease could arise, though covid obviously wasn’t it.
“21st century air travel is the best way to spread infectious disease around the planet within a few hours!”
Air travel is the only way to spread any physical stuff around the planet in a few hours.
It has the drawback that it can be stopped.
Regarding infectious disease, from a military point of view you might want to
The idea that the rulers are doing nothing more than watching their screens and finding out that X has happened, Y has happened, and so on, is in the running for the biggest lie of all during the current period.
I said as much earlier in another thread.
“deposit your stuff in various places around the planet first”
Like the Chinese ‘students’ in all of the UK universities and colleges? Like the Boys From Brazil!
Nothing is a right.
The only rights you or I or anyone have are those which we are capable of defending. If you are incapable of defending your bodily autonomy and the state forces you to take a medical treatment, then you have no right to bodily autonomy. At best you have a claim you are impotent to defend.
So I claim a right to travel internationally. And I denounce nation states that by means of violence and intimidation have given themselves the right to the land and to withhold it from anyone who the self appointed rulers of the land consider not of that land.
Fat lot of good my claim does, but I claim it nonetheless.
How do you enforce your right to get on someone else’s plane? It’s a great philosophical debating point which I would enjoy having & actually mostly agree with, but it’s not a practical relevant debating point in industrial civilization, where we’re all slaves.
I don’t claim a right to get on someone else’s plane.
I claim a right to freely reach an agreement with someone who has a plane to take me where I want to go.
And I claim the right to go wherever I like, however I might get there.
Unfortunately I have no means to defend my claims. So I don’t have those rights. But I believe I should have them.
Thanks for the mention.
I’d say that the important bit is to tell the truth to the public.
In the case of covid, the right thing to have done is to have said around May 2020 ‘thanks for the response — it was very important that you locked down because we didn’t know, but thankfully we escaped lightly this time‘.
Instead they have perpetuated the over-reaction, with continued threats and warnings. Given then everyone now knows that covid isn’t a massive danger (not benign, sure, but also not killing everyone) they’re adapting themselves to the constant message of doom coming from authorities around the world.
Ie, people now regard governments telling them of terrible risks and getting them to live under restrictions as ‘normal’ — what will they say/do to get people to change behaviours if an actual deadly pandemic comes?
I think it is too late. If we did get a problem pandemic it would kill huge numbers before people changed behaviours. If we’re lucky this we won’t get another pandemic in the next 10 years or so.
That’s the problem with modern society, i.e. socialism, people won’t take responsibility for their own lives & politicians are governed by polls, so yes no authority would likely act quicken enough in a real scenario!
In fact, I think the neoliberal obsession with eradicating disease is an erroneous one doomed to failure.
But that wasn’t my point I was merely addressing practical mitigation measures, which you seem to appear to be rowing back on, ya pain in the ****! (sarc).
Well Mr Gates has been muttering about Smallpox – Marburg for quite a while.. so nothing would surprise now. These creeps will have to keep doubling down to achieve their goals, and at the end of the day we are regarded as ‘useless eaters’..
“In the case of covid, the right thing to have done is to have said around May 2020 ‘thanks for the response — it was very important that you locked down because we didn’t know, but thankfully we escaped lightly this time‘.”
Absolutely not!
The lockdowns were criminal overreactions that they only got away with by gross exaggeration and massive fear propaganda. We certainly knew enough by March 2020 to know that lockdowns weren’t needed. As a few sane countries proved.
We should have stuck to the flu pandemic preparedness plan we had worked on for years, and which the UK regime set out to follow. It was perfectly sufficient. Unsurprisingly, letting fear and panic rule over our reason didn’t end well.
“If we did get a problem pandemic it would kill huge numbers before people changed behaviours. If we’re lucky this we won’t get another pandemic in the next 10 years or so.”
The “crying wolf” point is fair enough, but since we have not had a “problem pandemic” in many decades (and arguably one is hugely unlikely to arise in the modern world at all), and seem to have pandemics similar to this one (ie best responded to by keeping calm and carrying on) every few decades, maybe it’s a good thing if people learn to ignore the panic-mongers.
“I’d say that the important bit is to tell the truth to the public.“
Absolutely, but our culture long ago accepted that it was far too dangerous to tell people the truth. Instead we accept a managerial “controlling panic” rationalisation for paternalist lying.
“International air travel isn’t a human right”
Then it could be argued that walking from your home to the shops isn’t a human right. There are no ‘rights’ – we are all lucky in what we are allowed to do by those who have the big sticks, guns, and nuclear weapons and money.
OK stop with the stupid shit, if you’ve got your own plane then fine, but if you’re using EasyJet you’re fucked. OK?
I knew expecting a grown-up debate on current practicalities was a mistake.
‘The game lodges in northern Botswana employ hundreds of local people and most have managed to scrabble through the last two years.’
Other board games were available
Not a lot of use complaining now. The time to tell these people to fuck off was in March 2020
And now they have the Monopoly with their very own mutant virus.
Which has put them all at Risk.
You can’t really complain if you then go on to demonstrate how far you have bought into the bullshit. You are complicit in maintaining the very nonsense that you say is affecting your economy so much.
BBC News website rugby sides Cardiff and Scarlets return from South Africa.
A new Covid variant circulating in South Africa has seen the country put on the UK red travel list.
The Welsh regions had travelled out there earlier this week for the resumption of the United Rugby Championship.
Answering a query from Newport West MP Ruth Jones in the House of Commons, Javid replied: “As for what can be done to try and get them back before this deadline… nothing.”
Helpful little cunt isn’t he
Botswana, the covid-infested, variant-ridden hellhole that had a total of just six, PCR scam enabled, supposed ‘covid’ deaths last week.
Yeah, but that’s 0.0000001% of their population…….
And…and… something something . EXPONENTIAL…something something! [excited hyperventilation]
But, they aren’t journalists, are they? Hacks at best, I’d say. And not even honest hacks.
Well, I blame TY’s propensity to lick clean the anus of the execrable Johnson and Tory gummint for not seeing this would happen.
the journalistic spheres inability to hold them to account for the last 2 years worth of cockups, and pushing the fear porn on their behalf will be remembered
I am filled with sympathy right up to the point at which I read how the country is slavishly following mask rules, hand sanitising rules and are essentially begging for the authorities to declare the jab is good against its “variant” so that the jabbed can be allowed to go there without hassle.
So in essence they are complaining that they have been good boys, followed all the rules and are being punished unfairly.
At which point I think they are turning themselves into slaves of the bio-security super state just like everyone else and they can go and rot.
Sympathy from me: zero.
Let’s have a prediction then for 17:00, closest wins?
Lots to choose from in freedom bingo:
Masks
Lockdown
Pureblood lockdown
Circuit Breaker
Passports
Curfew
Levels 1-5
R0
Xmas lockdown
Flatten the sombrero
Heavy heart
No worse than Delta
No restrictions
Following the science
Monitoring closely
Get triple boosted jabbed to save granny at xmas?!
HOUSE!
Pepa Pig?
An admission that Jabid is his love child?
We are at war with Germany?
Susan Michie wants to finger your entrails.
The chocolate ration is increased?
Matt Hancock is Harrys dad?
Not sure I can face it. Have a stiff drink at hand, but suspect that won’t suffice.
Am I reading the Guardian?
Sob story from presumably quite wealthy expat , one of the worried well. How dreadful its happened when all the NPIs were being followed. Have you had your booster of those vaccines that are working so well?
I wouldn’t mind betting that the locals dispense of all the crap as soon as they head home, and that the majority of any illness/deaths in Botswana is within the ex-pat communities, just like the rest of sub-saharan africa.
Well, the last part of the postcard sounds like the author is fully subscribed to the official agenda and more than happy to be fucked some more. Until this sort of Stockholm syndrome virus is eradicated from the brain of everyone on the planet, the pandemic will never end.
Is this some sort of payback by our lords and masters against pesky non-covidian Africa, for simply refusing to be genuinely affected by it?
Criminal, literally creating poverty, because they can
” Bullingdon Club initiation ceremony claim: New members of David Cameron’s old club ‘burn £50 note in front of beggar’ “
Boris Johnson sounds ill – he is labouring when he inhales.
Stress, he knows what he is doing, he knows we know what he is doing
Agreed.. and to be honest I thought the Peppa Pig waffling incident was not what it at first seemed. It struck me as signalling. That was my initial gut reaction anyway, it seemed contrived on his part, and I’m as sceptical and against what’s going on as anyone on here..
He’s good at getting something for the media to focus on and they did
Codename Peppa = release the Botswana Variant!
So… ‘more transmissible and can evade jab based spread reduction….’
Well, more transmissible is good and they repeatedly tell us the jabs don’t stop spread – seriously wtf kind of clown world am I living in….?
First journalist out the gate “WHY AREN’T YOU LOCKING DOWN HARD NOW, IS ANYONE ON SAGE SAYING LOCK DOWN NOW AND IF NOT WHY NOT?!?!?”
“Botswana variant”? Isn’t that racist?
Bots are not a race. They are generated by computers
Just saw the latest announcements.
I increasingly think this will never end. Ever.
Two years of being goaded to live in fear.
That is already over 2 per cent of a normal human life span.
Yet another “variant” to frighten everyone with.
This can be perpetuated for ever.
And it is all based on unproven Germ Theory.
Nobody has ever shown experimentally that viruses make people ill.
If anyone on this site knows of a study that showed that then please say so.
Germ Theory is just medical dogma.
The journalists are mental, they all need to get out in the real world, we do not care.
OMICRON = MORONIC = yes apt and a laugh, but..
OMICRON = ONCOMIR = a much more sinister anagram. It’s microRNA associated with cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncomir
And just by chance, Israel on Thursday held a “war game drill” OMEGA in case of an outbreak of a new lethal variant of Covid-19. Just a coincidence of course..
OMEGA goes live and then OMICRON appears worldwide a day later..
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/middle-east/article/3155763/israel-holds-war-game-case-lethal-new-coronavirus-strain
Yes thanks to many scientists willing to speak the truth we know this new variant is mild and marking the end of the road for COVID-19.