I’d like to do something controversial. I’d like to talk about something serious.
Last Wednesday, a young girl was killed in a bus crash in weather conditions described by every news agency’s overstatement staff as ‘horrendous’. This is a very sad, but frankly quite mundane occurrence, or it would be if it hadn’t been on a school trip. Now, every newspaper, parent, teacher, TV presenter, “news man” and opinionated twat in the street is having an emotional dick-waving competition to see who can make the school look like the biggest cunt for causing this apparently unprecedented event.
However, as is so often the case in these situations, blame is being attached wrongly.
Back in the shadowy past of 2002, a ten year old boy named Max Palmer drowned during a school trip to the Lake District. Again, this was very sad, but the main thing that came through in the news coverage, apart from their semi-sincere, slightly difficult to believe sympathy, was that the school was very much to blame. As a result of this, field trips and the like dropped off in frequency with massive effect. Schools, as public bodies, couldn’t afford the potential legal recourse and subsequent costs. But it is rather presumptuous to blame the school. In this case, yes, the teachers were found ultimately responsible, but that can’t be applied to every single situation, a concept which the news media doesn’t quite seem to have grasped.
So here we have this latest situation. The most common phrase used is “The real question is; Why was the bus allowed to leave?” or words to that effect, and as such, people are asking each other this. But I can answer. The bus was allowed to leave because the driver turned up, and said they were alright to go. Teachers aren’t supposed to be weather experts. It shouldn’t be their responsibility to say whether or not a road is safe for someone else to drive on, and yet that’s very much what people are saying. The problem is, the school aren’t talking. And with very good reason. There isn’t actually a response they can give that doesn’t incriminate them or make them look callous.
Basically, it’s just another case of the news media stirring things up, like that malicious little specky kid telling the school bully that you’ve been calling his mum a slag.
