I wanted to like this book. To use a few clichés (of which more later), Stopping Bad Things Happening could have been the stake through the heart of all the bad stuff that keeps me awake at night: it might have killed off my nightmares of emergency inspections, stage three complaints and the latest regulatory requirement on Prevent. I dared to dream that it could reduce to something intelligible the hydra-headed beast that is SEND provision. And those are just the known knowns; my blood runs cold (apologies again) when I think about all the stuff that can unexpectedly go wrong in a school. Who wouldn’t seek out a metaphorical umbrella to stop the faeces reaching the air-conditioning unit? I wanted to need this book. It didn’t work out that way.

My hope survived a few pages, and then the jargon, and, yes, the clichés, began to slow my page-turning hand. Layer upon layer of policy initiatives began to form, with each page outlining a new response plan, which would no doubt require a new sub-committee to be convened, each in turn dragging in the poor, benighted teachers forced to give up their protected time to endorse initiatives and ideas that will quickly justify the committees’ existence. If, as Mike Waters thinks, state schools really have reached the point where they need to employ an intelligence coordinator (otherwise known as a busybody), then the sector is perhaps right to feel paranoid about who its friends are.

The author constructs a world that seems, at times, Kafkaesque. This is a place where sinister forces conspire to undermine not just how schools are run, but the sanity of those who try to run them. Response management plans are no doubt necessary, not because of regulatory requirements but because the author once experienced “the sudden unexpected arrival of figures with the authority to suspend the headteacher”. And then there is the strange case of the email or letter that turns out to be a letter “bomb”. I don’t even know if that was, literally, a bomb, or something more figurative. But such details no doubt mattered to the recipient.

Anecdotal evidence

There are some recommendations that look, well, a bit dodgy. Take the case of the head who was being intimidated by a parent. This tormentor “stared daggers at him every day in the playground”, which reduced this school leader “almost to tears” (who said it’s only millennials who are snowflakes?). The author suggests that “representatives” from the local community speak to “the malcontent”.

Well, you can guess why they don’t tend to do this sort of thing: it might be a challenge to get “sending the lads round for a chat” into any preparation management plan. There are other recommendations and arguments put forward by Waters that are supported only by anecdote. Surely, in an area as critical as risk management, the more evidenced-based and substantiated the claims are, the more chance they have of being adopted.

Of course, the human interest stories add colour to what is, after all, a rather dry subject. But the clichés and jargon (such as RMPs and BCPs, covenant framings and prevention management plans to name a fraction) in many ways distract us from the author’s main arguments, dulling their finer points, some of which are valid.

Perhaps it is the English teacher in me who rails against “big asks”, of it always being “better to be safe than sorry”, of everyone in the school singing “from the same hymn sheet” (unless it is a very disadvantaged chorister school, of which there are not many). Schools in this book should not allow their pupils to be “wrapped in cotton wool”, or their parents to “rule the roost”, and although there may be “beds of roses” there can also be “fields of nettles” (sometimes in the same sentence, which is uncomfortable).

All this is a shame, because at the heart of this uneven book is a very useful guide struggling to get out. Waters’ advice - to “acknowledge but don’t admit” when a complaint is first made and to be emotionally “neutral” in those initial stages, together with his further insights into those critical moments for a school when a first response can often determine final outcomes - should be written in every staff handbook, and almost justifies the price alone.

Perhaps we really have moved into a world where endless policies have to tightly intermesh, tying down, Lilliputian-like, schools, and school leaders, rendering them too intimidated by risk to innovate. Trying to stop bad things happening is a worthy endeavour, but the safest approach can, paradoxically, come at the highest cost because it puts in jeopardy all that schools, and education should stand for: namely, liberation of thought and the freedom to be unencumbered by stultifying conformity.

David James is deputy head (academic) at Bryanston School. He tweets @drdavidajames