PUBLIC SCHOOLS ADVISED TO ABOLISH CANING

The heads of Britain's top independent schools have been advised by their supreme policy-making body to abolish the cane and other forms of corporal punishment. This recommendation to scrap a tradition that is as old as fagging has gone to the country's major boys' preparatory and public schools from the Independent Schools' Joint Committee, which represents 1,300 establishments.

It follows on from a highly confidential questionaire sent to the three main organisations involved:
The Headmasters' Conference (HMC) which has 220 public school heads in membership; the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools (IAPS), 400 of whose 550 schools are for boys; and the Society of Headmasters, with some 50 heads. The questionnaire asked the 670 school heads what forms of punishment they adopted (cane, slipper, tawse or other) and how often it was used.

Many of the heads to whom I spoke over the weekend were embarrassed by the " leak" and angry at the "interference" by the ISJC in the way schools were being run. Three out of four heads I approached claimed that they rarely "if ever" used the cane these days.

One prep school headmaster attending last week's IAPS conference at Cambridge, declared: "I never use the cane, only the slipper - and then only for trivial things like messing about in the dorms after lights out. It does no harm." A Roman Catholic priest, headmaster of a Surrey prep school, said: "It's ridiculous to expect us to declare openly that we shall abolish caning. I've not used the cane for many years. Not once. But it is there to be used and the boys know it. To announce abolition would be like saying that there'd be no more parking fines. Can you imagine how drivers would react? Just think how our boys would receive such news."

A spokesman for the ISJC remained adamant. Yesterday he said: "This is not a sign that boys' schools are going soft." He declared that where a school was "in any doubt about its policy on corporal punishment, the ISJC recommendation is that the school should consider abolition." This follows on from the fact that corporal punishment has been used less and less in the independent sector in recent years

But he admitted that the use of the cane or slipper was a matter for each school and for the parents who choose to send their children there. "The survey was confidential and sought to establish the exact position in schools." He said that many schools had already replaced the cane with other punishments such as suspensions and detentions. One reason for the gradual decline in the use of the cane was, according to the spokesman, the increasing number of boys' schools that were going co-educational.