Lootman wrote:bungeejumper wrote:Up to a point, Lord Copper. People can think what they like, but if the law says no discrimination, then that's that. In this case it's a particularly fair and constructive law, and the photographer's decision to flout it was invevitably public because the recipients have the photos. Sometimes we should be glad that the transgressors are idiots.
I did not see any claim that this act was criminal. Only that it was in bad taste, and executed tactlessly.
And I did not say that the photographer's action was criminal. If I did, please tell me where I said it? If I didn't, how about acknowledging that, and maybe even apologising?
Or do you sincerely believe that laws concern themselves only with criminality? If so, then boy, you have a lot of rethinking to do. To spare you the trouble of looking it up yourself, I'll remind us all that the 2010 Equalities Act (for instance) leaves no doubt whatsoever as to the illegality of taking any discriminatory action within a school which disadvantages any person with a protected characteristic.
And that the law doesn't ask whether the discriminatory action was deliberate, or even whether it actively harmed the individual? It's enough that the pupil was excluded from something that should properly have been his/her right. And I don't know about you, but I'd say that being in the class photo was quite an everyday sort of social right. And that the exclusion would have hurt.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission's report on the application of the 2010 Act in educational establishments (
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sit ... bodies.pdf) doesn't leave a scintilla of doubt on any of these points.
That doesn't mean that criminal law will take action against this photographer, but it doesn't make his action legal either. I have already said that he may have been under extenuating personal pressures - and I'll also agree that special needs pupils can sometimes be noisy, disruptive, and generally not very conducive to group activities. (Our friends have a SEND kid with all those characteristics, and yes, he can certainly misbehave.) In that sort of a situation, the photographer should have called for guidance and assistance from the school staff, and in extremis he should have postponed the event until he (and they) had calmed down a bit. But he didn't, and it was more than just a faux pas.
You seem to go properly off on a tangent in your last couple of paras, though. Are you suggesting that, because your school streamed its pupils according to learning achievement, that was in some way comparable with disadvantaging, excluding or isolating a pupil because he's got a special need (physical, mental or both)? "
The idea that there were winners and losers was everywhere" just doesn't connect with this case at all, I'm afraid. We're talking about protected characteristics here (disability, race, gender or whatever), and that's a very different sort of matter.
BJ