Mother of boy restrained and placed in cupboard urges legislative change

A mother who said her son was restrained and also placed in a cupboard has urged MLAs to act to stop the practice.

Deirdre Shakespeare said her son Harry, who is autistic and non-verbal, still suffers panic attacks following those experiences when he was five years old.
He is now a teenager.

In 2024, the Public Services Ombudsman found Harry had been “restrained unnecessarily” in a chair in school, and without his mother’s knowledge.

The watchdog also found that “failures in this case caused the child’s parents a huge amount of distress”.

Ms Shakespeare appeared before the Stormont Education Committee, and urged the repealing of the power that allows the use of reasonable force for good order, and to put children’s rights into law.

The proposed Harry’s Law aims to make it mandatory for schools to record and report physical restraint or seclusion of a child to parents and the Education Authority (EA)

Supported by Children’s Commissioner Chris Quinn and Rachel Hogan from the Children’s Law Centre, Ms Shakespeare told MLAs that her campaign started when she discovered her son was being restrained and segregated.

“This wasn’t to prevent immediate harm. It wasn’t an emergency and it wasn’t a last resort,” she said.

“This was normalised practice forcing him to sit, to play, to complete tasks and schoolwork.

“Non-speaking children rely on adults to protect them, but when Harry tried to show staff that he didn’t want to sit, they tied his feet down to the chair and they forced him to sit.”

She said seclusion was also used as another form of restriction.

“This meant being placed in a small cupboard in the classroom called the dark room,” she said.

“Harry is a non-speaking child with an intellectual disability. He couldn’t verbally tell anyone what happened to him. He couldn’t report the daily harm, but sharing Harry’s experience became a catalyst that exposed something that many other families knew, and it was happening quietly, routinely and without any oversight.”

She said promises were made by the Department of Education in March 2022 which raised the expectations that policies “would be brought into line with human rights standards”.

“But I remain extremely concerned that the department risks repeating the very failures that led to Harry’s experience, because a core problem remains in place – the legal power to use force for the purpose of maintaining good order and discipline has not been repealed, and this wording is outdated and is dangerous.

“I’m here today to ask you to finish what families have started, repeal the power that allows force for good order and discipline and put children’s rights into law, not just policy, and make sure that no parent ever has to discover the harm like I did when Harry showed me whenever he pointed to a photograph to show that he was restrained.

“Harry still lives with the impact of what happened, he has panic attacks, night terrors, he has crippling anxiety and he still has fear of his feet being touched, a constant reminder of what happened to him.

“Unless the law is changed, this will continue to happen over and over again.”

Ms Shakespeare said she met Education Minister Paul Givan last year, which she said had been a good experience, but said she feels there hasn’t been any progress.

UUP MLA Jon Burrows said he had full empathy and compassion with Harry’s experience.

He raised the challenges teachers face, and asked if they had met with teachers’ unions, adding that 300 teachers had been injured in the last year.

“I understand the complexity of the issues that some of the children have, but also for safety of the teacher, we have teachers being injured, and we need to make sure teachers are able to protect themselves and other pupils from someone who is being violent or dysregulated whatever the cause of that may be,” he said.

“Do you accept that teachers are facing a very difficult situation with some pupil behaviour.”

Mr Quinn said he meets with teacher unions regularly, and there is a consensus there must be robust guidance.

Ms Hogan said they are also seeing evidence of children being injured, predominantly young nonverbal males with bruising from being held in prone positions on the floor.

“It’s an issue of balancing of rights, and having a very robust clear framework there for decision making that is based on human rights, and that includes the human rights of teachers as well as children and classroom assistants,” she said.

The committee agreed to write to Mr Givan to express their preference to see “re-engagement” and progress on the issue.