When parents lose faith in schools' ability to protect children from harm, the consequences can be devastating. EMILY CLARK reports

Slumped on the sofa, Richard teases his sister and answers back at the television like most 13-year-old boys.

But he is not in school today and has not been for two months since he claims he was beaten up during an unsupervised detention on April 24.

Unaware of the cause of his serious stomach pains, he was admitted to hospital two days later. It was not until doctors removed his appendix in search of a cause that they recognised signs of abdominal injury caused by being hit.

His mother, Kathleen Lamprell, who pressed assault charges against the three boys involved, feels let down by the way Ravenscroft School handled the incident.

Headteacher Mary Karaolis is convinced that the injuries, which left Richard in hospital for a week, were caused by friendly play-fighting not bullying, and punished the boys with one day's internal expulsion.

Next week Richard is going to appeal for relocation to East Barnet School.

"I will do whatever the law will let me do to teach them a lesson," said Mrs Lamprell, from the Dollis Valley estate in Barnet. "I do not want them locked up. I just want them to know that their behaviour is unacceptable."

But Mrs Karaolis believes radical action is not the answer and is anxious that Richard return to his lessons.

"The only way forward is negotiation," said Mrs Karaolis. "We monitor situations very carefully to make sure there is nothing further that can go wrong but clearly we did not get the opportunity to do that in this case because Richard is not in school. I would rather he came back.

"It does not happen often but occasionally parents can be too emotional to look at a situation rationally and accept a wider point of view.

"If we were convinced bullying had taken place, the outcome would have been very severe."

In a second instance, a 13-year-old returned to The Edgware School this month after nearly three years' absence because of severe anorexia caused by bullying. The boy, who wishes to remain nameless, was three-and-a-half stone, at the peak of his illness.

"The bullies were ripping his clothes to pieces and he would come home with black eyes, split lips and bruises," said Violet Stowe, the boy's aunt.

"He told me you cannot see inside my head but you can see my legs'. What they were doing to him was killing him, and it is a long painful death. All we are asking is for these people to be excluded."

Because this teenager did not want to tell the authorities who was bullying him, there was little the school could do.

Headteacher of The Edgware School, Philip Hearne, has bent the school rules to allow the boy to carry a mobile phone on him during lessons.

"If you want to move forward and find a way out, sometimes you have to accept that the world is not perfect and a solution is not perfect but it is the best you can get at a given time," he said.

"You quite often have to figure out what happened and that may not fit with one party's perception of events."

Because bullying cases are so individual, Barnet Council encourages its schools to keep the guidelines flexible within a certain framework.

Expulsion is avoided wherever possible and on the rare occasions a child leaves, permanently or for more than 15 days, they are educated by the LEA's pupils referral unit.

A spokesman said: "Exclusion is the last resort for schools. As in all behavioural matters, they attempt to manage the situation rather than exclude a pupil."

Clearly every case of bullying needs to be addressed individually but parents are losing faith in schools who do not take radical action to protect their children. Solutions require compromise, because a child's education does not.

June 27, 2002 15:00