Hell hath no fury like a mother in search of justice when she believes her offspring has been attacked in school. But there are two sides to every classroom story, says Christopher Martin.

Painful extraction

Parents come in all shapes and sizes but, more interestingly, they approach school from a bewildering variety of standpoints. Some trust and support their child’s school in all their contacts with it, even when its disciplinary procedures have to be applied to their own offspring.

Others, by contrast, can persuade themselves that the school is there uniquely to thwart their child’s development at every turn. Thus, when Mrs P arrives unannounced in my office at 5.30pm, I am intrigued to learn to which camp she belongs. This rapidly becomes clear.

She is not happy and she is not alone. In fact she has brought her entire family with her. As soon as she is satisfied that everyone is facing the right way, Mrs P fires her broadside. Her son has this afternoon been involved in a fight as a result of which he has lost a tooth. This would be bad enough but sadly it transpires that this is the very same tooth that had been fixed as recently as the previous week at great expense.

She insists on prising open her reluctant son’s mouth to demonstrate the gap. Mother, heavily pregnant, is not only out of pocket but out of patience and it’s easy to see why. One can make all sorts of allowances for anyone in her current condition, especially when she is confronted by renewed expense and what looks like an unprovoked attack by another boy.

Intolerable injustice

However, my expressions of concern and my promises to look into the affair as a matter of urgency merely prove inflammatory. With the conviction stemming from a sense of intolerable injustice, she quickly becomes hysterical and from then on there’s no possibility of getting to the bottom of things. She insists on invoking the full weight of the law and is going to take out a prosecution for assault on the other boy.

I know the accused lad quite well. He was in my general studies class and I find it hard to see him as a natural aggressor.

Mrs P has no doubt at all, however. “My son has told me everything. He never lies. It was an entirely unprovoked assault.” She has spent three hours on the phone to her son’s long-suffering houseparents and expresses amazement when I tell her that she has reduced the housemother to tears.

She assures me that she has written a six-page letter of complaint to me detailing the facts of the matter. She will come back for a pound of flesh the next morning.

Curiously abashed

Tomorrow dawns and the post brings Mrs P’s letter, as threatened, which thuds on to my desk. It starts, “Dear Sir or Madam.” Given that we met as recently as yesterday, I now start to worry about such indecision.

Fortunately, I now also have the head of year’s report of the investigation which he conducted overnight into the incident. Thus I am well prepared for her subsequent visit.

This time she brings only her son who seems curiously abashed, given the status of victim with which he has been invested by his mother. It is now clear from our investigation that her son, “who never lies”, had been making a string of racist remarks at his aggressor over quite a period.

Eventually patience had snapped and the blow was landed. I read the report to her and hand her a copy. She rejects our findings out of hand and turns to her son as living proof of what she is quickly coming to see as the school’s attempt at a cover-up.

However, avoiding eye contact with his mama, her wretched son reluctantly admits everything and his poor mother implodes.

From a position of incontrovertible rectitude to one of abject apology is a hard journey for anyone and by the end I feel real sympathy for her. As she leads him out by the ear, it is finally clear to her that her hapless son deserves all that she is undoubtedly going to give him.

• Christopher Martin was head of Millfield School, 1990-1998 and is the author of Head Over Heels: In the Hot Seat at Millfield School, with a preface by Estelle Morris, former secretary of state for education. It is available from www.moonrisepress.co.uk

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