A teacher has explained why she refuses to let her students use the restroom during class, and some parents are not happy.
When I cast my mind back to my days at school, I remember that using the restroom in class was a point of contention.
I won’t sit here and say I actually needed to use it every time because there were occasions when I just wanted to get out and have a walk around.
However, on the occasion when I, or others, were desperate, it was infuriating when the teacher wouldn’t allow us to briefly leave.
Well, one teacher in the UK has opened up about why she doesn’t let her students go to the restroom during class.
During a lunch break, the teacher shared her perspective in a video posted to her TikTok account, where she explained the frustrations some parents have with teachers enforcing strict bathroom rules.
“I’m just sitting here on my lunch break, marking books, and I’m just thinking about the problem that parents have with teachers not letting their kids go to the toilet,” she began. “Today, I had about three examples where I did not let the children go to the toilet.”
The teacher hoped her explanation would help parents understand her approach, but the response was largely critical. She shared several examples to illustrate her reasoning.
In one instance, she described how she denied a student’s request to leave the classroom for the bathroom while the child was participating in a paired reading activity.
“I said no because it would make the activity futile for both the child and their partner,” she explained.
In another case, she refused to let a student leave during a maths lesson, as she was in the middle of explaining an important task.
“If you now go to the toilet, when you come back, I’m gonna have to explain the activity again to you,” she said, emphasizing that she often asks children to wait for a few minutes until key instructions are delivered.
She also highlighted how students sometimes ask to go to the bathroom immediately after break time, just as a new lesson is starting.
In these situations, she also prefers to ask the child to wait to avoid missing important information.
“So there will be times that I, as a teacher, will tell your child, ‘Not right now, you can’t go to the toilet,’” she admitted.
“I think parents get defensive and seem to think that we just want to deprive your child of their human rights. It’s not that. We’re humans as well, and most teachers actually care about kids, and that’s why they’re in the job in the first place.”
Her candid comments didn’t stop there.
In the post’s caption, she added: “If you want your child to receive special treatment, mainstream state school probably isn’t the place to be sending them. Some parents really are setting their kids up for failure in real life with all this pampering and entitlement.”
Well, despite her reasonings being fairly understandable, some parents were not pleased.
One person commented: “If you need the toilet that’s all you will concentrate on.. so the child won’t actually be taking in the information and it’s likely it will need repeating anyway?”
A second person said: “In university you dont even have to ask to go you just go, same with work, what are you even preparing them for?”
A third added: “I’ll be honest i told my son if he needs to go toilet and gets told no i as his mother give him permission to walk out of his class.”
A fourth said: “My son had an accident at school yesterday because he was riddled in anxiety to even ask the teacher to go to the toilet out of genuine fear he will be told no – respectfully I can’t have that.”
What are your thoughts?