Corpun file 20976

Daily Mail, London, 30 May 1967

Carry on caning!

Heads vote against scrapping the stick

HEAD TEACHERS voted yesterday to keep the cane in schools. Only two of the 500 delegates at the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers voted against.

The decision, taken at Harrogate, Yorkshire, rejects one of the main recommendations in the Plowden Report on education.

The Plowden plan -- for a complete ban on corporal punishment -- would "fetter freedom to ensure good order," Mr. C. Coleman, head of a Cardiff school, told delegates.

He said: "It seems sometimes that in discussing corporal punishment, more heat is engendered than in its actual application.

Force

"Those who work in primary schools today would say that the degree of physical pain is less than the children cheerfully accept in the playground or on the football field.

"We don't discuss punishment in the context of the thumbscrew or the rack. It is the application of force in the right concentration at the right time and in the right place.

"The justification for the retention of corporal punishment is that it is in the interests of the child, the school community and society generally."

The conference later agreed to a plan under which students would have to repay part of the cost of higher education unless they completed a spell of "approved public service" in Britain.