Heads protest at 'school rage'

Heads have seen a rise in the number of violent parents

By BBC News Online's Katherine Sellgren at the NAHT conference in Harrogate

Head teachers are protesting against what they claim is a significant increase in assaults on school staff by parents.

Citing a Cardiff school as one example of violence against teachers, the National Association of Headteachers claims the number of its members assaulted or threatened by parents has doubled in the last year.

Roger Brind took a meat cleaver off a youth

Roger Brind, who now works at Trelai Primary in Cardiff has been a headteacher in for 21 years.

He has been physically assaulted twice and verbally abused on a number of occasions and says that violence towards staff was 10 times more prevalent now than in 1980.

Mr Brind said: "We have had to introduce more security, so it's harder to get to staff, which I regret, because I like to run an open, welcoming establishment."

He says that the increased risk of violence was having an effect on recruiting staff to senior posts.

It is stressful - I've had time off work through stress after these incidents, and I'm a strong character, not the type of person to be pushed over easily

Head teacher Roger Brind

"I've had fewer and fewer people applying for senior positions," he said.

Commenting on the two occasions when he was assaulted - one time a parent spat in his face, another a parent held a knife to his face - Mr Brind said: "It's like being put through a mangle and wrung out".

"It is stressful - I've had time off work through stress after these incidents, and I'm a strong character, not the type of person to be pushed over easily," he added.

"I actually took a meat cleaver from a child who was in our school playground, he was a youth of 13 or 14 who was there brandishing it around."

Tip of the iceberg

The NAHT says last year there were 140 cases in which parents were banned from school premises after violent incidents.

The head teachers' union says this is the "tip of the iceberg" and that there has been a "significant deterioration" in the behaviour of parents collecting pupils from school or attending parents' evenings.

And in response the union says it wants a "zero tolerance" policy towards unruly parents, including the right to exclude the children of disruptive parents.

"If the relationship between the parents and the school has irretrievably broken down because of ... violence or threatened violence, there is absolutely no reason why the school should be expected to educate their child," says the union.

The union is also calling for a change to the law on parenting orders, so that parents convicted of offences against school staff could be banned from school premises.

Threats

The union has urged local education authorities to take a tougher line to protect teachers from aggressive parents - and for the courts to pursue incidents in which school staff are threatened.

The union's general secretary, David Hart, said the "rising tide" of assaults and threats of violence against his members must be reversed as soon as possible.

"It is absolutely intolerable that public servants should be subjected to increasing risk of injury and abuse," Mr Hart said.

"Of course we will continue to recover substantial compensation on behalf of our members.

"But it would be infinitely preferable if firm and decisive action were taken by government, local education authorities and law enforcement agencies to protect those responsible for running vital public services," he said.