“Thwack to the future”
From the TES Magazine on 20 November:
Ferris Lindsay believes in traditional education based on learning and discipline – ‘corporal discipline’, as he likes to describe it. The DCSF wants his school closed down, but with one in five teachers claiming to support a return to the cane could his ideas gain currency?
The law on what constitutes a school has already been changed to ensnare him, but after a brief hiatus Mr Lindsay is again advertising for pupils and aiming to relaunch his “school”. He is not going to give up easily. “I love teaching. It is my passion,” he says.
Today Mr Lindsay’s pupils are three of his own eight children: Joe, 15; Hannah, 13, and Dan, 10. Until half-term he was also teaching two other children, although both have since moved to other schools.
Discipline is the distinctive factor in Mr Lindsay’s approach. Although he is anxious not to be defined by it, his attitude to corporal punishment – or corporal discipline as he terms it – is the issue that put him outside the law and ultimately brought the educational establishment down on him.
Mr Lindsay believes that teachers should be able to smack children. He believes it should only be exercised as a last resort, and always with parental permission, but should be allowed nonetheless….
Before branching out on his own, Mr Lindsay taught at Cedar School, a 30- pupil independent primary in east London. Corporal punishment was an integral, though rarely used, part of the ethos at Cedar, and when the law changed to ban corporal punishment in independent schools in 1998, the school closed.
But when two of Cedar’s parents asked him if he could continue teaching their children, he decided to set up on his own. The result was Tyndale Academy in Forest Gate, east London, named after the Protestant reformer who translated the Bible into English and was burned at the stake as a heretic.
To circumvent the ban on corporal punishment, he restricted the hours he taught. According to Ofsted, an establishment where pupils were taught for 18 hours or fewer a week does not meet the criteria for full-time education that define a school and therefore was not subject to the ban…
Without recourse to corporal punishment, he believes teachers are deprived of an important disciplinary tool… Mr Lindsay claims that he has not used corporal punishment for 14 months. But he retains the right to employ it. Parents are asked to sign up to his disciplinary policy, and if they change their minds their children will be exempted, although they are requested to move to another school at a convenient break in the school year.
For Mr Lindsay, teachers administering corporal punishment are not acting in loco parentis, but with the specific delegated power of the parents. He does not smack children because he is a teacher, but because a child’s parents have given him express permission to do so.
“That is not a loophole; it is a principle. Teachers should never have that right, but parents should,” he says. He believes it should also be used sparingly. “If it (corporal punishment) is used as cake that is terrible; if it is used as medicine it is not. It is not in the diet, and if a teacher is using it all the time, that is wrong…”
