At Hogwarts, girls enter the first-floor girls’ lavatory - otherwise known as Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom - only when they really have to, because, apart from being haunted, “it is very gloomy, with cracked and spotty mirrors and chipped stone sinks. The doors to the cubicles are flaking and scratched…”
The Harry Potter books capture the experience of thousands of children up and down the country. School toilets are unloved, neglected places, purely functional, often filthy, and sometimes very smelly.
In essence, the toilet area is a microcosm of school life, with its own rules and power plays
They can be dark spaces, in which pupils are bullied and tormented many a young head has been held down the pan and flushed. But they can be useful too, for a crafty fag or a quick gossip, away from the watchful eye of the teacher.
In essence, the toilet area is a microcosm of school life, with its own rules and power plays.
It’s also a place to which access is tightly controlled by schools. During lessons, children have to ask to use the loo, which raises eyebrows with some foreign visitors. The decision then to grant permission or not can come not in response to any physical need of the student, but to the teachers’ need to maintain order in the classroom.
Unsurprisingly, not many children ask. Like the Hogwarts girls, most pupils use the lavatories only if they have to: their dreadful reputation is well earned.
A survey a few years ago by the website Netmums and the children’s continence organisation ERIC found that a quarter of all schoolchildren avoided using the school toilets because they were “dirty, smelly and missing soap, toilet paper or even locks on the doors”.
This often forces children to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid using the facilities, with some not drinking or even eating all day, leading to all sorts of health problems.
Royal wee
Luckily, some forward-thinking school leaders are taking the issue of toilets seriously. One is Keziah Featherstone at the Bridge Learning Campus all-through school in Bristol. There, rather than the traditional separate rooms for boys and girls, the school has installed toilet cubicles with floor to ceiling doors facing out onto an open communal sink area. These are mixed gender and clearly visible, positioned off corridors and open spaces.
Ms Featherstone believes that it is important to make lavatories attractive and safe, to encourage children to use the facilities and put an end to unsociable behaviour. It also shows that schools care about them and their needs.
“The toilet is one of the few places in school where a child can be alone and quiet. When they are alone and quiet, we want them to know that we value them,” she says.
Crucially, she believes that improving facilities should be prioritised even at a time of squeezed budgets. Perhaps schools could even be a little entrepreneurial to help fund them. It’s certainly not unknown in the history of school toilets. Greg Jenner, the man behind CBBC’s Horrible Histories, tells of teachers at Eton College in the 16th century selling their charges’ urine to be used in the process of softening leather.
Schools could even take a leaf out of US universities’ book and ask for donations for naming rights to bathrooms. A bathroom in the campus library at the University of Pennsylvania was funded by one philanthropic well-wisher who knew how to spend a penny wisely.
There was a catch, though: the walls had to be lined with plaques saying, “The relief you are now experiencing is made possible by a gift from Michael Zinman.”
@AnnMroz
