“The supply teacher just gave my class the middle finger,” squealed Rohan in Year 5, as he ran into my office this week.

At the time Rohan arrived, I was working on my Inset presentation for after half-term, and making sure my slide that says “defending the indefensible” is in there somewhere.

I include it in every whole-staff training day, every year, as a gentle reminder to everyone that, as long as we all put the children’s interests first, do our jobs well and act professionally, none of us will ever be in the position of having to defend ourselves against something we shouldn’t have done.

“The middle finger?” I finally replied to Rohan, the three Inset words echoing in my head and my pen now poised over a hastily grabbed incident form. “Tell me more.”

Defending the indefensible: giving pupils the middle finger

Rohan was one of those squeaky-clean ones: a badge-wearing school councillor with no prior convictions and honest to a fault. Consequently, I sensed there was trouble coming and that my upcoming pupil-progress meeting might need to be rescheduled.

Rohan gave a lengthy and tortuous explanation, with much improvised hand-miming. It transpired that Mr Clench, the supply teacher for the day, had his own, unique and highly unusual teaching mannerism. For reasons known only to him, he chose to use his extended middle finger, palm facing the floor, to point out which children should answer questions during his maths lesson. 

Try it. It’s not rude but it feels completely unnatural.

I nodded and smiled patronisingly at Rohan. Then I started to explain to him that, while Mr Clench’s finger-pointing technique was not the customary one, his actions in class were actually perfectly fine.

“That’s not the worst bit though,” Rohan interrupted, smiling patronisingly back at me, as I bit down hard on the end of my pen.

“We all told him it was rude,” he continued, “but he said it wasn’t because the rude way...” -  Rohan paused here for dramatic effect - “...is this way.”

And with these three words still hanging in the air between us, Rohan turned his palm, face upwards, expertly giving me the middle finger, seemingly not registering this as an exciting coup to report back later to his Year 5 classmates. 

“He did it to all of us,” he added, gesturing now with both of his podgy middle fingers, making me suspicious that he did, in fact, know exactly what he was doing.

It turned out, through subsequent cross-examination of the rest of Rohan’s class, that this story was absolutely true.

Defending teachers to the hilt

My conversation later with supply teacher Mr Clench was both illuminating and baffling. He confirmed the story was indeed correct but didn’t know what all the fuss was about. He was merely correcting the children’s misconception, like all good teachers do. He didn’t think it was “indefensible” at all. 

He also didn’t appreciate my additional concern that a tsunami of parental complaint emails would flood the office inbox the next morning, and that this would take considerable time for me to mop up.  

The incident form didn’t go in my satisfyingly slender “defending the indefensible” file, since I couldn’t defend it. Instead, it went straight to the supply agency for them to deal with. 

We didn’t have Mr Clench back the next day.

Of course, the flip side of the unspoken “defending the indefensible” deal with the staff is that if a parent ever makes an unjust criticism, starts telling anyone how do their job or is simply plain rude, I need to step in and defend them to the hilt.

Having a meeting, making a phone call or writing a strongly worded email to that parent is the very least a school leader can do, to allow the rest of the staff to keep on doing a job that is incredibly difficult at the best of times and has been even more challenging in the past year.

Several hours after Rohan had first arrived in my office, I returned to my desk and continued to prepare my Inset-day presentation for after half-term. I read it through from the beginning and was surprised to see how long it had become. It included several new curriculum initiatives, Covid booster-group evaluations to complete, end-of-year reports to finalise and countless other things to add to ever-growing staff to-do lists. 

In the context of everything else that was going on, I suddenly realised that I was in danger of having to defend the indefensible myself, and wondered if I was going to be on the receiving end of some completely justified secret one-finger salutes by lunchtime on Inset day.

I shook my head, took a deep breath and then extended my own middle finger, palm downwards, Mr Clench style, and used it to select half the slides and hit delete.

Colin Dowland is a primary school headteacher in North London. He tweets as @colindowland