A head teacher has refused to apologise to a father accusing her of "bullying" pupils after they were subject to "humiliating" punishments if they were caught talking at lunch.
Sylvia Stronach, headmistress at Ramnoth Junior School in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, banned children as young as seven from speaking to their friends in the canteen as it created an "uncomfortable" atmosphere for adults. If they were caught breaking the rule, Stronach would subject the offending children to public humiliation.
Punishments included writing lines, holding a teacher's hand or leaving their lunches standing in the centre of the hall.
Father Nathan Smith, who is a governor of another local school, said he found out when his children came home and told him. It transpired the new rules had been "on and off for some time".
"Frankly this attitude and treatment of the children struck me as the lowest form of aggression, bullying and humiliating the pupils who have dared to have a differing opinion," he told local paper Cambs Times.
Stronach defended the decision to implement the ban, saying the experiment had not been taken lightly as "the level of noise over the past few weeks has been horrendous". It made the dining hall "an uncomfortable place to be both for children and adults," she added.
"If the noise level continues to be unacceptable then we will have to go back to short periods of silence. This decision lies entirely with your children," she told parents in a letter.
"The children should find the school to be a happy and harmonious place to learn and instead it appears that the whip is favoured over the carrot, figuratively speaking," Smith continued.
Smith and his wife encouraged their children to write to Stronach but the headmistress apparently only berated the students for making spelling mistakes in their letters of complaint.
"Parents are understandably distressed that attitudes towards discipline that were thought to have been left in the seventies were alive and well in the school," said Smith.
In her letter to parents, Stronach told them she expected children to behave in an "appropriate manner in the dining hall which makes it a pleasant time for all".
"The acoustics of the dining room are not good and the cooks cannot hear what the children are asking for," she added.
Stronach denied banning children from clapping after happy birthday had been sung to pupils saying it was "untrue".
"They are allowed to clap but they are not allowed to scream and do high pitched whistles," said the teacher.