Duty of care cannot mean duty to get hurt
Published:Wednesday | February 4, 2026 | 12:09 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
The recent public discussion following court rulings and tragic incidents of violence linked to schools raises a difficult but urgent question: What does “duty of care” reasonably mean for teachers in today’s Jamaica?
No civilised society can accept the death of a child at or near a school without deep moral outrage. Parents rightly expect that schools will act to protect students from harm. However, an emerging tendency to place near-absolute responsibility on individual teachers – particularly when violence escalates rapidly – demands closer scrutiny.
Teachers now operate in an environment vastly different from that of previous generations. Student disputes increasingly involve weapons, group attacks, and social media-fuelled escalation. At the same time, teachers and administrators have themselves become targets of threats and physical assaults by parents angered over disciplinary actions. There are documented cases where educators who intervened in student conflicts were later attacked by adults on school compounds, forcing closures and police involvement.
In this context, the expectation that a teacher must physically intervene in every altercation, regardless of risk, is neither reasonable nor safe. Duty of care cannot be interpreted as a duty to absorb violence.
Intervention must be understood as a spectrum of responsible action: early de-escalation, summoning support, alerting administrators, and involving the police or School Resource Officers when serious threats or weapons are suspected.
Jamaica’s own education safety guidelines recognise these layered responsibilities. Reducing them to a single demand – “the teacher should have stopped it” – oversimplifies complex and dangerous realities.
Equally troubling is the silence around parental accountability. When parents threaten or assault teachers, they erode the very authority structures that keep schools safe. A society cannot demand decisive action from educators while tolerating intimidation against them.
If we are serious about protecting children, then we must also protect those entrusted with their care. This means secure school environments, enforceable consequences for violence against staff, adequate supervision structures, and clear legal protections for teachers acting in good faith.
Blaming individual educators after tragedy may satisfy public anger, but it does not make schools safer. Shared responsibility, not scapegoating, is the only path toward preventing further loss of young lives.
DUDLEY MCLEAN II