[Gordon Booth]

Anne, I appreciate your honesty in putting forward your opinions but I believe you are so, so wrong.
You have been in your career 30 years. To me your views totally reflect the all pervasive political correctness which is pulling our society down.
A child's rights don't come first, to the exclusion of all common sanity- the rights of the society we live in,our way of civilised life, come first.
The weakness of your arguments are shown when you start bringing up Child P and Victoria Climbie- acts of sheer wickedness by adults against harmless small children. You bracket a teacher who has a milk shake thrown over him and stops a teenager(probably as big as him) from throwing a chair at him without causing him any physical harm with them- you insult that teacher.
As I said, when I was young there were plenty of wild kids about, some had never seen their fathers and when they came home from the war the boys resented the father figure imposed on them for the first time and reacted badly.
However, whatever the problems at home we all knew the rules in school existed and would be imposed and respected. Now we have a different set of rules-children are supreme even if they are uncontrolled anarchists. What do you think happens to general discipline in a school where a teacher is suspended, perhaps fired, for trying to control a teenager without even harming him? The boy becomes a hero to his peers, the remaining teachers must be totally castrated.
You accept there are very few people you have been able to influence- once whole schools of teenagers were influenced to accept good behaviour, discipline, respect, even if they didn't particularly enjoy school.
Therefore your system,imposed on you or gladly practised, is a failure and our teenagers are growing up paying the price.