The Department for Education has said it will publish guidance for schools to help prevent and tackle the bullying and harassment of staff, amid an “increase in unacceptable behaviour”.
The move is aimed at addressing the recruitment and retention crisis hitting the teaching profession, with schools experiencing acute staff shortages that appear to be worsening.
However, school leaders have today urged the government to “go further” and to send a “clear message...that harassment and aggression towards school staff will never be tolerated”.
The DfE said today that the guidance was expected to be “completed” in the spring and that it was being announced following extensive consultation with school leaders and teachers.
Education leaders have previously warned that “too many teachers” are victims of unacceptable levels of verbal and physical abuse in the classroom, as well as “threats and taunts” on social media from students.
When asked by Tes whether the guidance aimed to tackle bullying of school staff by pupils as well as by those working in education, the DfE said that the guidance would cover a range of relevant issues.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said the guidance “may be of some help”.
“Sadly, we have seen an increase in unacceptable behaviour towards school staff in recent years,” he said.
Whiteman added: “However, we also need a clear message from the government that harassment and aggression towards school staff will never be tolerated. We urge the government to go further on this.”
Workload reduction recommendations imminent
The DfE is also today expected to publish the initial recommendations from its workload reduction “task force”, which is looking at how to cut five hours from teachers’ working week.
The task force will make its final recommendations in the spring and report these to the government, Ofsted, and school and trust leaders.
Cutting workload is seen as crucial to making teaching more attractive. Last year, the Commission on Teacher Retention warned that “getting workload under control once and for all has perhaps never been more critical than now”.
£1.5m for leaders’ mental health
The government has also today announced an extension of the school leader mental health and wellbeing service, currently run by Education Support, alongside £1.5 million of what it called new investment.
The programme will provide a further three-year mental health and wellbeing support package for school and college leaders running from April 2024, after an invitation to tender was published in November.
It will have a target of providing professional supervision and counselling to at least 2,500 leaders. The DfE clarified that this number would be on top of the more than 1,000 school and college leaders that had so far benefitted from the scheme.
The scheme initially had a target of reaching 2,000 leaders by March 2023.
Mr Whiteman said that, while the extension of the scheme was helpful, it was important that the government went “beyond a focus on tackling the symptoms of stress and poor wellbeing in the school workforce”.
“It is essential we also start tackling the root causes, including the overly punitive accountability regime that currently does so much harm,” Mr Whiteman said.
The department has also renewed a contract with Now Teach to support career changers into teaching. The contract, valued at £1.5 million, runs until October 2026.
‘Significant progress’ against DfE wellbeing pledges
The DfE said that more than 3,000 schools and colleges have now adopted the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter, two years after it was initially launched.
A progress update, which had not been published at the time of writing, would show the “significant progress made on its pledges”, the DfE claimed, including the commitment to “embed staff workload and wellbeing considerations into government decisions”.
The government missed its target for recruitment of secondary teacher trainees for this year by 50 per cent, according to data published last month.
Meanwhile, the number of state-school teachers leaving the profession hit its highest rate in four years in the academic year 2021-22, with one in 10 (43,997) recorded as having quit the classroom.
Schools minister Damian Hinds said that it was important to ensure “teaching remains an attractive and rewarding profession”.
“That’s why we have announced new investment and reforms today to support teacher wellbeing, ease workload pressures and tackle bullying and harassment of staff,” he said.
