By 
By Paul Moore
A number of years ago there was a spectacularly successful sitcom called ‘The Rise and Fall of Reggie Perrin’. It starred Leonard Rossiter as a successful business man who was so bored with his corporate middle class life that he decides to plan his own disappearance.
The programme followed his negotiation of this disappearance and was peppered with what, for that time, were highly experimental sequences where, for example, his boss would turn into a hippopotamus while he was talking to him.
The success was probably due to the fact that it shifted the thinking about what a sitcom is to a new level and it touched a nerve with many who were becoming increasingly-disillusioned by the corporate life they were living and the dull consequences of such a life spending free time playing golf or bridge with people you do not like.
I was reminded of Reggie Perrin last week when it emerged that a school in Harryville, Ballymena had ‘misplaced’ 24 of its pupils.
This startling fact was then compounded when the Department for Education informed us that there were in fact over 50 children missing from schools across the region. Clearly all Reggie needed to do to effect his disappearance was to enrol at Harryville school and he was guaranteed never to be heard of again. Even the school’s statement that ‘most’ of the missing children had been located did little to assuage the concern about those who had not been located.
I have no idea how a school manages to misplace the children in their care. To be fair there have been many occasions when I would have paid good money to have the monsters I was trying to teach disappear, but it never really occurred to me that this was possible.
Certainly none of my senior bosses ever offered the possibility and the nearest we could get – expelling a pupil – apparently causes even more trouble for a school than simply keeping them and putting up with the consequences of their behaviour.
It might have been possible when I was a primary school child a hundred years ago but these days, with the understanding of security and child safety, it has to be almost impossible. I recently had occasion to visit a primary school and getting through the front door is worse than trying to win ‘The Traitors’.
To get into the school one has to navigate five hermetically sealed door systems and on getting through these, one is immediately confronted by Sister Michael from Derry Girls who has a hundred questions as to who you are and why you dare to enter her empire. (For clarity I do realise that it is unlikely there is a Sister Michael patrolling a school in Harryville but believe me there are similar examples in ‘Protestant’ schools. By way of warning they generally wear Monde fashion outfits.)
As you might imagine getting out of said school involves an equally labyrinthine process so spiriting 24 children away seems farcical. Even then there is the simple issue of daily attendance registers, security cameras, parents who might well be looking for their offspring and the plethora of social media apps which I am told track both children and parents, even at weekends.
To be a little po-faced I do understand that this is not a laughing matter. Several cases recently have illustrated the tragedy of children falling through the system only for authorities to take up their cases years later.
It is also indicative of the fact that many families have no roots and are forced to be nomadic, often moving at a moment’s notice.
Schools should not be made the scapegoats for a system which, like many things in the contemporary space, are broken almost beyond repair.
