I remember being shocked at some of the responses to this post a few years ago – Schooldays, the most miserable days of your life?. The comments section turned into a kind of group therapy session, with some genuinely harrowing tales.
Listening to a recent podcast, one guest described schools as trauma factories. Harsh, you might think – but it’s true for a lot of people.
Behind the nostalgia-soaked lens some wear, the truth for many is far grimmer. Bullying, loneliness, relentless pressure to fit in or perform, the stifling of creativity, the subtle (or not-so-subtle) cruelty of children – these things don’t make for fond memories.
What struck me reading those stories was how normal it is for people to carry that pain for decades. The scars of childhood don’t just fade with age. For some, they’re not even scars – they’re open wounds.
So it’s reassuring to know that, as a society, we’re still doing our best to give our kids the same terrible experience some of us went through. From the BBC:
Shutting a child alone in a room in school should be banned immediately, MLAs have heard.
That is according to Rachel Hogan from the Children’s Law Centre (CLC).
Ms Hogan gave evidence to Stormont’s Education Committee into pupils being restrained or put in isolation in schools.
The DUP MLA, Peter Martin, said there were some “extremely harrowing examples” of what had happened in Northern Ireland.
“The majority of these cases are occurring in relation to children with disabilities, often non-verbal young boys,” Ms Hogan had said.
“It’s so draconian, it’s not the way we do things today,” she later continued.
“There has been a significant delay in bringing forward promised changes.”
Ms Hogan said that it had been parents who had “dragged this difficulty into the light”.
Deirdre Shakespeare’s son Harry was “restrained unnecessarily” in a chair in his school, a report by the public services watchdog previously found.
The Public Services Ombudsman, Margaret Kelly, later told MLAs that her investigation found that Harry had been subject to a level of restraint that “caused real distress”.
Mrs Shakespeare and some other parents have campaigned for “Harry’s Law” to make it compulsory for schools to report when they have isolated or restrained a child.
The committee’s deputy chair, Sinn Féin MLA Pat Sheehan, said MLAs had previously heard of a child with autism who “had his hands tied to the chair with a schoolbag.”
“And more recently, we heard of a child being tethered to a fence,” he continued.
Yup, it’s 2025, and our school system is abusing kids with disabilities.
Now, schools would defend themselves by pointing out that they’re being asked to deal with a whole range of social issues without any extra government funding or support. Teachers are often dealing with kids from chaotic home lives, poor mental health, undiagnosed neurodiversity, etc. They are not just being asked to teach but also to be social workers as well. What exactly are they meant to do with disruptive kids when they is 25 other kids in the class who want to learn?
Of course, the people in power—those who made the decisions—largely send their kids to grammar schools, where things are much more rosy. But even grammar schools have their own issues. Many kids struggle with the intense academic expectations and stress. Friends who are lecturers at the University tell me that many local kids have very little self-direction, are used to a system that spoonfeeds them, and struggle to cope with the independent learning style of the University.
Our school system needs to be modernised. This 19th-century model is completely unfit for the 21st century. We grind kids down, strip them of creativity and agency, and break their spirits. We still separate many kids at 11, and brand the ones who don’t pass the transfer test as failures. Despite millions of years of human evolution, where humans evolved to be active, any kid who can’t sit still for six hours a day is branded disruptive or ADHD.
And let’s not forget how disproportionately this system fails those who are already marginalised – neurodivergent children, children from low-income families, ethnic minorities. If you don’t fit the narrow definition of what a ‘good pupil’ looks like – quiet, compliant, academically inclined – the system doesn’t just fail you, it punishes you.
The absurd thing is that we know better. We have decades of research on child development, learning theory, trauma-informed education. We know that creativity, physical movement, autonomy, emotional safety – these things matter. But somehow, we’re still stuck in a Victorian mindset that treats education like an assembly line.
The Republic of Ireland has made some moves toward more inclusive practices – reducing early school leaving to around 4%, with more investment in emotional wellbeing. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, still clings to grammar schools, still overuses exclusions, still isolates vulnerable kids.
And while politicians wring their hands about falling standards or mental health crises, they ignore the root causes festering in classrooms every day.
Let me stress – I’m not attacking the teachers. They’re doing a thankless job under a lot of pressure. I’d actually like to see teachers have more control over how and what they teach. They are just as much victims of this broken system.
We need a total rethink – not another round of box-ticking initiatives or league table reforms. What we need is a school system that sees kids as human beings first – not units of production, or stats to be measured.
Because if schools continue to traumatise so many of our kids, we can’t be surprised when they grow up distrustful, disconnected, or depressed. We’ve trained them for it.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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