I have a good friend who believes that teacher training mainly consists of getting the trainees in a room and showing them a video of a student tipping on a chair, falling off and dying.

Once the trainees have seen this, they can truthfully go on and tell their students they saw someone fall off and die once, as part of the daily patter of the things we tell kids not to do.

I have been reading through this forum on TES this evening (why? should be either planning or sleeping!) and it seems tales of woe resulting from chair tipping are never far away, whether or not you need a snuff video in your training year to underline the point.

Tales of falling and cutting heads, falling onto sharpened pencils, falling and biting through lips, and tripping others up are commonplace. Many traumatised teachers recount tales of the injuries they have had to deal with and the damaged children and staff that have resulted.

The bits I like best were the strategies when telling a child to sit properly has not worked. Sit on the chair properly – or stand – or sit on the floor. Sit on the chair properly, because I don’t want to spend my afternoon mopping up your blood when you fall and break your head. Sit on your chair properly because I can’t have a new carpet for another 10 years and I don’t want this one stained. Sit on the chair properly because the last thing I need is to have to fill in another “child injured” form. Sit on your chair properly because if you fall out and fall unconscious, who do you think in this room is going to have to give you the kiss of life?