PARENTS have hit out at a secondary school which shut for the day over "health and safety" fears - due to an IT glitch. 

Computer servers at Sir William Romney's School "went down" on Tuesday afternoon prompting teachers to cancel all lessons today.

But the decision led to fury from parents in Tetbury who hit out at the "snowflake" school on social media. 

One parent wrote: "There was a time when the school only had one computer, in the maths room, and we still attended every day quite safely."

Another added: "Very strange! It's kind of like giving us a day off when we were at school because our pencil was blunt!" 

One furious parent vented: "Don't parents get fined for not sending their kids to school? 

"But it's ok for school to prevent parents from going to work, at little or no notice, by requiring pupils to not attend because a few computers aren't working?" 

Another added: "Feel very disappointed at the lack of resilience shown by the school. 

"Luckily my son is old enough to stay home alone tomorrow or I would have had to cancel my nursing shift to supervise him. I'm not impressed." 

The school, which has around 480 pupils, said in an official statement posted online that the outage happened on Tuesday and it hoped lessons would restart tomorrow. 

A spokesperson said: "Due to all our IT and servers going down this afternoon, school will be closed on Wednesday 13th September due to health and safety reasons. 

"We will be working incredibly hard through this evening and tomorrow to ensure that we can safely teach all students on Thursday. 

"We sincerely apologise for this unforeseen closure and the inconvenience caused to all our students' learning." 

Replying to criticism, a spokesperson said on Facebook: "Registration, fire alarms, intruder alarms, safeguarding issues, parent contact details etc etc didn't operate in this manner then [in the past]. 

"Now it does and in the main it's a wonderful thing but on occasion, like everything, these things go wrong."

Headteacher Jon Bell said the IT meltdown hadn't impacted alarm systems - but was to "do with safeguarding and child protection". 

He added: "We couldn't guarantee if an emergency occurred on site we could contact home." 

He said the school had paper records - but due to it being the start of term, they were "not quite as accurate as we would like". 

In a statement posted online, he said staff had wanted to continue teaching but agreed that the safety of students was a priority.

He said: "Sir William Romney's School believes the safeguarding and safety of every student is our utmost priority. 

"Unfortunately, the failure of all our servers caused the entire IT network to crash. 

"This has resulted in all our data and security systems failing to function, and has compromised our ability to ensure students are safe and accounted for at all times. 

"Teachers, support and operational staff were keen to continue with lessons and learning without the use of IT, however, after much thought and discussion, it was agreed that the safety of all our students was the absolute priority."