Middle ground needs to be found between keeping children safe and allowing them to play on school playgrounds - Jayne Dowle

The headteacher said the policy has been introduced following a spate of incidents between children during breaks and lunchtimes, some of which have left pupils with minor injuries. She added that a number of other measures already put in place had failed to stop the ‘rough play’.

It’s easy to judge from a distance, but if the perpetrators of ‘rough play’ are certain individual children, surely it would have been less contentious to deal with them individually, rather than invoking a blanket ban which affects all the pupils. But maybe that approach would have brought its own problems.

It is customary, at this point in the argument, for parents (and grandparents) to recall their own schooldays. For the record, I went to a rough tough primary school, Doncaster Road Junior and Infants, in Barnsley in the 1970s.

When we weren’t playing the particularly brutal game of British Bulldog, which involved physical kidnapping, being tackled to the ground and pinned down, or Charge, which was like the First World War without ammunition, we were giving each other Chinese burns and climbing the concrete fence that backed onto the railway line.

Our teachers, for the most part, would stand at the junction between ‘infant’ and ‘junior’ playgrounds, sipping their mugs of Maxwell House and only intervening if a child actually managed to escape over the fence.

There were no playground supervisors, unless you counted the dinner ladies who wouldn’t have been seen dead intervening in any kind of physical altercation. And if we fell and grazed our knees, it was off to the staff room for a quick anointing with bright yellow iodine.

Nothing much was ‘rooted in love’ at Donny Road school in the 1970s, but there was far less wanton bullying in those two concrete courts than at the comprehensive I later attended.

Obviously, times change and mostly for the better. I’m glad that primary schools now are aware that many children feel frightened and vulnerable in an environment in which physical prowess is prized above all.

However, speaking as a parent, I’d say there is a need for balance. My own two children attended a lovely primary school with playgrounds backing onto green fields. The headteacher, no slouch herself when it came to draconian disciplinary measures, wisely held up a strict age segregation policy.

This meant the older children in Years Five and Six could race around with abandon without trampling smaller children in the rush. However, I do recall the uproar when this same head decided to ban footballs. To the gang of ball-mad boys my son belonged to this was akin to being told to stay indoors at break time and work on their cross-stitch samplers.

It's a tricky one, isn’t it? I did complain about the football ban, if I recall, because my basic instinct is to allow children pretty much free rein when outdoors, as long as basic rules are followed.

However, I’m not entirely of the ‘school of hard knocks never hurt me’ brigade. I wouldn’t advocate going back to the free-for-all that was a school playground in the 1970s, because you really did have to be tough to survive.

I feel guilty now that some of the quieter children were probably terrified by the pack mentality.

What’s needed is a sensible balance. And whilst the aim of the Manston head, Hayley McNeill, to promote love and understanding is noble, I do think that children need to let off steam, especially in the academic hothouse that is a modern primary school intent on maintaining or improving its all-important Ofsted rating.

This school in Leeds, by the way, was rated ‘Good’ in 2019.

As one parent said, they would like their child “to be taught positive and negative contact as well as conflict resolution” and pointed out that the ban would fail to prepare children for their later years. And this is key, I think.