Do you tackle disablist language in your school?

The language of discrimination that uses terms offensive to disabled people is commonplace. That is the disturbing picture painted by an Anti-Bullying Alliance survey published to coincide with Anti-Bullying Week. One in 10 adults freely admit to using words such as “spaz”, “spastic”, “mong” and “retard” directly at people with disabilities and SEN – and half of those do so to be deliberately insulting. As many as 44 per cent of all adults use such terms in casual conversation, half of whom justify this as “banter”.

But is banter as harmless as its definition proposes? Earlier this month, there were media reports about a secondary school teacher from Norfolk who banned the word “banter” from his classroom in order to tackle bullying, because he claimed that it was used as a “Get Out of Jail Free card” to legitimise bullying through “victim blaming”.