Warning over violent pupils after survey of teachers

Pupil-on-pupil violence and aggression was frequently seen around school by teachers and support staff at both primary and secondary level.

Academics found that one in four primary teachers and one in five secondary teachers had witnessed physical violence between pupils at least once in the week of the survey and two-thirds of secondary heads said pupil-to-pupil verbal abuse had been reported to them over the same time period.

Pamela Munn, professor of curriculum research at Edinburgh University and one of the report’s authors, said the findings had to be taken seriously.

“The pupil-to-pupil aggression and physical violence are concerning because I believe that it is not just horseplay – some of that is bullying,” she said.

“It is important that schools keep bullying high on the agenda. Schools have got a lot of things they have to pay attention to and it is easy for them to forget that pupil-to-pupil relations are really important. It is something that teachers don’t necessarily pick up on all the time.”

Also of concern was the frequency of more low-level indiscipline such as talking in class, refusal to follow instructions, use of mobile phones and running in the school corridors.

There was also a worrying increase in the proportion of pupils who were refusing to interact with their lessons, which Ms Munn said may be down to growing evidence of depression among young people.

Although incidents of low-level indiscipline are not seen as particularly serious outside the school gates, they are infuriating for teachers because of the damaging effect they have on learning.

Ronnie Smith, general-secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, said: “Dealing with all of this is exhausting for teachers and frustrating for other pupils because it leads to unacceptable disruption in the

classroom. The people who lose out most are the other pupils in the class, whose rights are ignored and whose learning is inevitably damaged.

“Teachers are working hard to try to improve pupils’ behaviour, but they cannot solve the problem of indiscipline on their own and parents, too, have a role to play.”

Despite the concerns from the chalkface, there is much that is positive in the report.

The surveys of teachers found that physical violence by pupils towards staff was rare, with just three out of 557 primary teachers and four out of 1460 secondary teachers experiencing physical violence in the week of the survey.

Furthermore, 77% of primary and secondary heads considered that serious indiscipline or pupil violence had little impact on the running of their school, although this fell to 51% for secondary teachers and 43% for secondary support staff.

In addition, in almost all the indicators used by researchers to assess whether indiscipline has improved since 2006, when Edinburgh University first published the survey, teachers and headteachers believed things were getting better.

There was also some evidence that part of that improvement could be because of newer approaches to tackling indiscipline, which are now being more widely used in 2009 than they were three years ago.

Schools still do not tolerate violent or abusive behaviour, but, where a pupil is guilty of such an offence, different strategies are employed such as sin bins, the involvement of campus police officers and restorative justice techniques, where conflicts are talked through by pupils and staff to try to find a resolution.

Some schools have seen remarkable success with such programmes and, last summer, the work was praised by academics from the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh as an effective way of cutting exclusions.

Dr Stephen Sharp, another of the report’s authors, said: “There have been a lot of initiatives and there was a feeling that there were actually having an effect and that things were moving in the right direction.

“There was no thirst for new initiatives, but there was a feeling that what is happening in schools may be having a beneficial effect.”