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Please, sir, can we bully you?

Hasan Suroor

EVERY MORNING when David Griffin (not his real name) sets out for his school, he is filled with dread as to what might lie in store for him. But then, you might ask, what is new about it? "Children always hate to go to school. Don't they?"

Except that Mr. Griffin is not a school-going child, but a teacher in an inner-city London school, and the reason why, like hundreds of other teachers, he is always on tenterhooks as he approaches the school-gates is the fear of "bullying" by his pupils and their parents.

If some of the stories heard at a conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) last week are to be believed, discipline in Britain's state schools, especially those in the poorer areas, has broken down so completely that teachers feel "threatened." People such as Mr. Griffin, who joined the profession because they loved teaching, say managing a class has now become an ordeal.

"On a good day, some of us are verbally assaulted on an almost hourly basis," one teacher told the conference.

Jovan Trkulja, who teaches modern languages in a north London school, said he had been "hit" several times, and was once attacked by a "braying mob" of pupils.

Another teacher told the BBC that he had been slapped six times by a drunken student who had returned to the school after being excluded. "I stood there and thought `if I lay a finger on him I will lose my job,'" he said echoing the view that most often school authorities tend not to take any action against unruly behaviour.

In more serious cases, they prefer to settle the issue by giving compensation to the victims.

The ALT produced figures to highlight the increasingly threatening environment that teachers face in schools. Last year, there were 39 cases in which its members suffered serious injuries in attacks by students or parents. The injuries were serious enough to entitle them to compensation.

Physical assaults and humiliation at the hands of pupils or their parents are said to be one of the major causes for teachers deserting the profession.

According to a poll, two-thirds of the ALT's members considered leaving their jobs because of students' bad behaviour.

"Occasionally, the end result is that an adult can't physically or mentally cope because they are beaten literally and not protected — and we lose another good teacher," one primary school teacher said.

New culture blamed

Experts say the crisis has a lot to do with the new culture of "too much classroom democracy" which encourages students and parents to regard themselves as consumers of educational services, and exercise their rights as any consumer would. The result is that a teacher is no longer seen as a figure of authority but simply as another service provider who can be sued or bullied if he or she does not "deliver."

"And, so it comes to this: parents recording, covertly or overtly, teachers at parent-teacher meetings with the implicit threat that if Johnny's education doesn't turn out the way they expect it to, they will be heading to the courts," wrote The Times columnist Alice Miles.

The threat posed by the growing "parent power" was debated at length at the conference with delegate after delegate demanding a curb on "pushy parents." Even if some of the "anger" was self-serving and sounded like a plea for a return to the "good old days" when teachers regarded themselves as law unto themselves — and, indeed, were treated as such — their concern was widely shared even outside the teaching community.

The issue also dominated the annual conference of the National Association of Schoolmasters' Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT). The Association said the reported incidents of assaults on teachers, resulting in injuries, in 2005 were more than in 2004, and over £7 million were paid in compensation to aggrieved teachers last year.

"It is a growing problem," said an Association spokesperson pointing out that many incidents went unreported. "There are lots of cases where teachers are assaulted and they will not report it. They will be dissuaded from reporting it by the school because it doesn't look good," said the Association's legal officer Jim Quigley.

Thatcherite legacy?

Some believe the present crisis is a "legacy" of the former Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who famously declared that there was no such thing as society, but only individuals. She is accused of encouraging a culture in which people became obsessed with their own rights and interests — a culture which, then, slowly seeped into the classroom.

"The `I'm all right Jack' culture which she encouraged did more to destroy our society's social structure than anything else did. I also believe that it set us on the road to a society where there is far less respect than at any time in our recent history," said a senior Association official.

There is a view that the problem is exaggerated by teachers' unions. But even if a fraction of what is being alleged is true it does not present a pretty picture of Britain's school system. Promoting a liberal classroom culture is one thing (certainly nobody wants a return to the authoritarian era of baton-wielding masters) and allowing it to descend into a free-for-all is quite another. Can we have some order in the classroom, please?

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