A teacher could be killed because of an increasing tendency among parents to resort to physical violence, heads warned today.
Tim Gallagher, a school leader from Wolverhampton, speaking at the NAHT headteachers’ union annual conference, asked if it would take a death for the problem to be taken seriously.
Delegates said that physical and verbal attacks on teachers were “increasing in severity and regularity.” In one case, staff were threatened with an axe.
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The NAHT voted to call on government to protect teachers from physical, verbal and online abuse.
Mr Gallagher said: “Teachers and senior staff have all experienced ‘angry parent syndrome’ where a parent has stormed in, raising fire and thunder, looking for Mr A or Mr B who has had the temerity to deal with his or her child in a way that he or she does not approve.
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“This has often led to verbal or even physical abuse of staff.”
He said: “We must address ourselves to the problem as it is now. Do we need to have a death of a headteacher or a death of a senior member of staff like Jo Cox [the MP murdered in 2016] before we take this seriously?”
Michelle Sheehy, an NAHT member from Walsall, said: “I believe the general public are totally unaware of the level of aggression, sometimes on a daily basis. Two colleagues in a local secondary school to me have suffered racist and homophobic abuse and were then subsequently threatened with an axe.
“Another school that I am working with, in that school teachers leave in groups because they are afraid of violent repercussions from parents. It stops them from disciplining pupils in the way that they think they should.”
Another delegate said: “While I was on the playground waiting for the children to come into school, a parent threatened to kill me. She later said she hadn’t said that; she had ‘only threatened to punch my face in’ - so that is OK, isn’t it?”
The conference in Telford also heard concerns that school staff can face an onslaught of social media abuse which can they feel powerless to respond to.
Mr Gallagher said violent or intimidating actions involving adults were increasing at a faster rate than those involving pupils.
“They are often parents but often include wider family members who claim to speak to the family, whose challenges are myriad, including verbal and threatening behaviour, the recourse of social media, ignoring of complaints procedures and actual assaults,” he said.
“The world in which we live today has an increasing tendency to use a violent reaction towards authority as a seemingly acceptable means of retaliation.”
The NAHT voted to lobby the government to develop a strategy to prevent and reduce this behaviour, “which should include the introduction of safeguards to support school leaders and their staff”.
