See http://www.bbc.co.uk/new...k-england-essex-22839772 Any comments

From other news reports it would appear that the staff running this activity were not qualified to be teaching lead climbing. The school management said they weren't aware that this was taking place but the HSE said if they weren't should have been.

During my latter years at secondary school I enjoyed rock climbing (sometimes on indoor artificial climbing "walls", but mostly on real outdoor rock faces in Derbyshire and Cumbria) initially with a top rope or as 'second' to an experienced lead climber before becoming a lead climber myself. Therefore, I'm intrigued and irritated by the press reports regarding the school case because they neither explain the nature of the activity nor why the incident happened. This is partly because none of them include any diagrams which would have been invaluable in helping to explain 'lead climbing' to people who are not familiar with it. Perhaps diagrams were used by HSE to explain to the magistrates what happened. If so, it seems lamentable that i) HSE's press report about the case was not accompanied by any diagrams and ii) that media journalists simply echoed or paraphrased the HSE press report without understanding or questioning what the case was about. One website I've read suggested that the pupil doing the lead climb had successfully clipped his rope onto three safety points (alias running anchorages) during his ascent but struggled to clip onto the fourth one. Though it was reported that the "rope support failed" it' is not clear what failed.: Did the highest safety point physically come adrift from the artificial climbing wall and/or did the pupil doing the belaying fail either to anticipate the fall or cope with it effectively? No criticism of the pupil doing the belaying is intended here because he probably had little or no experience of belaying. Also, the BBC report on the recent court case concluded with a comment by the school's headteacher "We are completing an internal investigation and co-operating fully with the HSE to ensure that any improvements that need to be made are implemented before any climbing activities resume." If the incident happened over 7 months ago in October 2012 and the school knew of HSE's investigation and intention to pursue prosecution, surely the school should have completed a detailed internal investigation long before now. Among other things, the school management and others, especially its legal advisers, needed to have a prompt and clear understanding of the activity involved, what went wrong, what remedial actions were needed and also how to respond to the HSE prosecution. Even if the only realistic response to the prosecution was to plead guilty, surely it would have been better for the school's legal representative to have been able to tell the magistrates that the circumstances had been thoroughly investigated and that appropriate changes had been made!