Parents of a Bradford school girl who suffered an injury that left her blind in one eye are calling for more robust processes in schools to deal with serious incidents.

In February 2020, Mr and Mrs Thalim’s daughter, who was five years old at the time, was stabbed in the eye with a pencil by another Poplars Farm Primary School pupil. After receiving the school’s investigation report at the end of April 2020, they were left disillusioned with the investigation process and challenged the qualifications and experience of the investigators. They have been seeking more answers from the school ever since.

Mr and Mrs Thalim (pictured above) say the school’s explanation as to how the incident occurred was “very inadequate” and the way the investigation into the incident was conducted was “cloudy” and “messy,” leaving them with unanswered questions. Mr Thalim said their daughter’s surgeon made a safeguarding referral to Bradford Council as they hadn’t seen anything like this injury, save for vicious assaults or road traffic accidents.

Due to a lack of action for nearly a year on the referral, Mr and Mrs Thalim contacted the council. They say they felt the council was not concerned by the referral and it appeared to them that there was no appetite to follow up with an investigation of the school.

Mr Thalim says they completely lost faith in the school and local authority’s ability to deal with serious incidents, “The purpose of the investigation was to establish how this happened and the framework that is in place to prevent such an incident occurring in the future. It has answered neither of those questions reassuringly.

“The investigation was carried out by an HR company employed by the local authority, which to us calls its impartiality into question. The only substantive recommendation made by the HR Pact report was to change the first aid policy about eye injuries in school. There is no mention of reviewing current practices around equipment safety, nor communicating the importance of this incident to the wider school community to help prevent a similar incident happening again.

“It’s very important that these issues are dealt with in a robust way, particularly when you consider our daughter’s injury is life-changing and she has an increased risk of losing sight in her other eye.

“We feel the school is more concerned with saving face than with looking into how such a serious incident could have taken place under their watch or been prevented. It was only when we sought legal advice from Switalskis Solicitors, which we took as a last resort, that we started to get some answers from the school and the local authority. Today, more than three years on, we feel let down by a system we trusted would look out for the interests of our daughter.

“Had this occurred within the home, we would have been investigated and would have undergone scrutiny, and rightly so. However, with this being at school, to us the incident has been brushed under the carpet. We feel incredibly let down and have completely lost faith in the school and its leadership team.”

Ewan Bain  is a senior associate solicitor at Switalskis Solicitors, who has been advising the Thalim family. He says, “It is vital for schools and other public bodies to have robust, impartial and clear reporting processes in place for such serious incidents, to reduce the chance of them happening again. It has taken the family a long time to process what happened and come to terms with what their daughter’s injury will mean for her in the long-term. Only now do they feel ready to talk about it openly and share their experience in the hope others don’t suffer the same. Mr and Mrs Thalim’s daughter has since moved schools and is adjusting to life with her impairment.”