Thursday 7 October 2010

Hygiene - and children.

Schools are places where great numbers of children congregate together - and share infections and create childhood epidemics. How strange that in the vast majority of cases school toilet blocks have no provision for soap to allow the kid's to maintain basic toilet hygiene ?

Education authorities claim that when facilities are provided they get vandalised - hence school hygiene is consigned to the " too hard basket ".

The transfer of infections in hospitals has been lowered by constant attention to hand washing by staff. Part of the hygiene programme preached by most parents to their offspring calls for hand washing after toilet use - but the system falls in a heap when it comes to the education system.

We seem to have double standards when it comes to kids. On the one hand we have rigid safety standards of child restraints in cars. Drivers must meet capsule standards for small infants and this progresses through age groups - but when those same kids ride in a school bus they are not even offered basic seat belts.

School toilets bereft of toilet paper would cause a huge outcry from parents - and yet we seem to accept the lack of soap with a shrug of the shoulders.

Time to drag school toilets into the twenty-first century !

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