Okay, so you've written to Ofsted, the local newspaper and your local MP.



But now you've found out that a couple of kids who witnessed the incident have both written statements saying that it was a deliberate act.



How do you feel NOW about sending those letters turning up the heat on the situation?



Or another scenario:



It was an accident, everybody says that. The teachers were just overstepping their mark and getting all the paperwork into place so that the incident was best resolved with minimal damage to every party. The injured child would have been properly compensated, the teachers given a written warning after they admitted being at fault, but otherwise everyone can move on.



But with Ofsted and an MP coming in 2 good teachers have been fired, the insurance company are refusing to honour the claim and it's going to take the court system years to reach a conclusion.



Is that a good thing?

As we don't know what the proposed statement was for, or what was in it, all this speculation is just silly, especially the perverting justice stuff, which is just OTT and not to be taken seriously.



Nobody but a lawyer knows how to make a proper statement anyway, and it would be different depending on the intended use . A school boy's own statement would in general be pretty useless, through no fault of his own. Also, he might have dropped himself in it unnecessarily and naively.



Your motor insurance company forbids you from making a statement after a crash, if you admit liability - even verbally - they may even void your cover. Are they perverting the course of justice?

I have direct experience of a case where the police seriously considered charging a headteacher with the offence for doing exactly this - trying to manipulate statements and even taking them. The was one big difference though was in that case a member of staff was alleged to have struck a boy.

You need to speculate to at least figure out what has been going on.



If you just go to the school they will probably just placate you. You'll go back home and tell your kid that there's nothing to worry about. But next week when the **** hits the fan and all the blame is on your kid and he's getting expelled you've kind of let your kid down.



If the teachers actually were bullying kids to get themselves out of trouble, if they were threatening the "police" on a 13 year old boy to sign something that they knew was a lie solely to protect themselves, then the correct response is to go to the police and let the police deal with it.







Eh????









Read the OP. A 13 year old boy was told to sign a statement without reading it. He was then told to sign a statement of a couple of pages and given 1 minute to do it.







They are making it clear that a driver isn't qualified to pass judgement on an incident that they were involved in. They want the drivers to STFU and let the insurance companies figure out where the blame lies.



They don't want a situation where an 80 year granny is "persuaded" by the 18 year old who has rear-ended her that it was actually her fault all along.

I see your point, but it's not the accident(or whatever you want to call it), it's the funny business with forcing a 13 year old lad into signing an unread and possibly untrue statement. Don't like it one bit.



I doubt if the teachers, as you say, simply overstepped the mark trying to sort things out, would be fired. Severely reprimanded, probably. Fired, unlikely.

Is there anything in this world you don't have direct experience of?

His brain working.

I'm starting to get old and have lived life in the fast lane!



As to education law, Mrs Dally has spent the last 15 years fighting battles on behalf of one of our children, she has also seen paperwork on hundreds of other cases. With due respect to FA, even if he is a solicitor, unless he is one of the handful of experts who operate in the field of education law he will know less than Mrs D (and to a lesser extent me) on the subject. We have a bookcase of law textbooks on the subject! Mrs D goes to regular lectures on the subject.

As has been said, the OP should keep typed notes / minutes of evertyhing - exactly what son said, what was said in the meeting at school on Friday, etc. Ideally, send those minutes to school and ask them to confirm by return that they were OK and that if they do not response within a specified number of days then it will be assumed they are accurate. If something hits the fan quality, contemporaeous records will be important.

I was the first to reply. My first response was that the OP should forget about going to the school and go straight to the police. We're on the same side when it comes to anger about that.







We know that the teachers just overstepped the mark to sort things out. They shouldn't have done it, but it worked out the best for everyone. We're angry at the teachers for their tactics, but accept that their motives are honest.



The problem is that cal train's suggestion was to write to Ofsted, the MP and the newspaper. I don't think they're coming from the "it all worked out fine" angle.

I'd be very reluctant to be the one who involved the police. My initial move would be to attend the school myself and discuss these issues directly.





It's true. Unless you know the rules of evidence, and can apply them to the situation, having regard to the purpose for which the statement will (or even may be) used, then your "layman's" statement will very likely be rubbish, contain stuff it shouldn't, omit stuff it should contain, include hearsay, opinion, etc etc.



Of course, that's not to say that most statements are made by or with the help of lawyers, plainly the vast majority are not, and no doubt they serve various, usually non-legal purposes passably adequately, but doesn't alter the fact that in a legal setting most would not pass muster, and would need to be re-drawn.





All of which is indisputably ridiculous and unacceptable.





Well not exactly, that is one aspect, but the driver may be the world's leading authority on road traffic collisions, and a hundred times better qualified than anyone at the insurance co., that wouldn't make a difference to the requirement. Then again if the other driver wants to claim, then he has to prove liability, and lack of admission makes the case much easier for insurers to defend if they want to. Which is very often. Unless his essential position is ("I deliberately slammed the door shut on his fingers hoping to chop them off" (I presume unlikely) then I'd suggest the boy is at least as unqualified to pass judgement as the car driver.