DISRUPTIVE pupil behaviour in the classroom is endemic. It is one of the most quoted problems facing teachers, and one on which there is often conflict between them and parents.

The sad truth is that teachers, whose day is a battle to contain children who have no apparent interest in learning, seem to have fewer and fewer options.

The House of Lords might have ruled that teachers have the right to refuse to teach violent pupils, but in day-to-day skirmishes disruptive children often have the upper hand.

Ofsted’s chief inspector, David Bell, referred in his latest report to a “hard core of pupils with no social skills” whose language is “offensive” and who have “little or no understanding of how to behave sensibly”. They are, he said, “unteachable”.

If verbal and physical abuse is increasing and parental control is reducing, then the number of disillusioned teachers leaving the profession, now one in three, will also rise. One Leeds deputy head teacher with 30 years’ experience is in no doubt. “Some of these children are coming through secondary school not properly house-trained,” he says.

“They cannot sit still and listen and, perhaps as a result of computer and television habits, they expect to be entertained rather than to participate in an education process.

“The problems are particularly severe with boys. I think parenting classes should be encouraged. I don’t think teachers are given sufficient credit for managing these children whose parents simply can’t, or won’t, do anything with them. There was a time when parents who came into school to see staff about a problem asked what their child had done. Now they ask what the school has done to their child.”

Bad behaviour is not confined to disaffected teenagers from sink estates. The latest National Union of Teachers’ survey shows that disruptive behaviour is common in rural and urban as well as inner-city areas, and that it often starts in the nursery.

Of the 2,500 teachers questioned, 80 per cent thought that standards of behaviour had deteriorated during their time in teaching and that even children in nursery schools are now displaying high levels of unacceptable actions — ranging from offensive language to abusive and insulting comments and threats.

The report criticised the lack of support from local education authorities and parents, with one in 12 teachers claiming to have been threatened by parents at least once a term.

Professor Joan Freeman, an educational psychologist from Middlesex University, and vice-president of the College of Teachers, says that teachers are not being given proper training in how to deal with abusive pupils.

“It is not the rare, headline-making incidents so much as the low-level, day-after-day disruption that is the problem,” she says.“The effects on other children in the classroom can be extremely damaging — it is hard to concentrate if someone is kicking you under the table.

“Teachers need to be trained in the psychology of control — this does not mean excluding children from school activities, but introducing incentives and rewards for acceptable behaviour. The incentive of exam success does not work — it is too far away. I think that we all expect too much of teachers, and if the problem turns into threats then the child should be referred for professional help.”

Parental influence can be crucial, although Nick Barlow, a psychologist at Leicester Royal Infirmary, points out that many children come from over-controlling backgrounds where they are so used to being told off that it has no effect when used by teachers. “These children may have problems concentrating in a classroom, but they have no problem concentrating for hours on computer games or the TV,” he says.

“So perhaps it is that they see no relevance in what they are expected to learn. That is why broad-based policies in schools don’t work. The child must be addressed as an individual.”

Eamonn O’Kane, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, says: “The depressing reality is that many teachers in schools today have to put up with a persistent, high level of abuse which in any other profession would not be tolerated.”

The Government plans to invest £470 million over the next three years in a new national behaviour and attendance strategy. If it helps teachers to stop being undermined by the behaviour of some pupils it will be money well spent. If not, anarchy in the classroom will only get worse.

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