Pupils in smart navy school uniform hurl dustbins across the playground. An upended picnic bench tumbles onto the concrete. Goalposts are uprooted. And all of it is captured by mobile phones, to be turned into content in teenage bedrooms later.
These riot scenes come from one of the many protests that have been happening in schools across the country – all captured on TikTok and all centring on toilets. The Department for Education has released a statement saying it is “concerned” about what is going on, while TikTok is full of jerky footage of schoolyard activism, videos of which are viewed tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of times, with pupils from different schools encouraging each other to launch their own protests.
Sometimes strict school uniform policies are mentioned, including rules on skirt length, but the common thread, at schools from Cornwall to Yorkshire, is the rules some schools have introduced restricting pupils’ access to toilets during lesson time. The scenes on TikTok show a breaking down of the relationship between teenage pupils and teachers – but why have toilets become the front line in this embittered standoff?
