Before COVID, I used to write a regular Blog which was posted here on the school website. This was quickly overtaken by regular, sometimes weekly letters home. I would like to return to using this medium of communication to talk about issues in school or education generally.
I would like to start with the emotive subject of school toilet facilities.
Over the last few years as we have refurbished our toilets in school, we have opted for a more open plan approach.
Many schools have removed gender specific toilets, favouring toilet areas that only have cubicles which can be used by any youngster and students have access to central hand basins. The central circulation areas outside of the cubicles is accessed directly off a corridor. Anyone, student or staff, walking down the corridor has visibility into the toilet circulation area.

The image here gives you a sense of what is possible to achieve given the money and a blank canvas. This is a new school building in Southend, Essex. The design premise is to reduce the number of areas around the school that cannot be monitored or checked upon. This reduces the risk to young people.
Remodelling the facilities in buildings that are 60 years old or more, like Oaklands, is not quite so straight forward. In addition to the limitations of the structure, moving services and drains is prohibitively expensive. This results in a compromise. When we refurbished the facilities in Newman Block, we maintained two individual sets, but similar to the design above, the circulation areas are visible from the corridors. They are designed to ensure that the dignity of the users is not compromised. The corridor and circulation areas are covered by CCTV.
When we refurbished the facilities in Thomas More Block a few years previous to this, there were an additional number of structural limitations which prevented us being so creative, however we were able to put vision panels looking into the circulation areas. Despite having visibility of circulation areas from corridors, in reality they can’t be watched all of the time. A number of parents have questioned whether we should increase the CCTV coverage into these circulation areas.
I would welcome your views.