A RISING tide of violence from pupils and, increasingly, parents is threatening to undermine the state education system, head teachers said yesterday.

An unruly minority of children were disrupting lessons while teachers were suffering assaults and even death threats from parents willing to use violence and intimidation to get their way. In some cases, teachers’ families had become targets in campaigns of terror waged by parents.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said: “The rising level of abuse, threats and assaults by parents towards our members is totally and utterly unacceptable.

“Some parents are unwilling to pursue their complaints by using the existing procedures properly. They use violence or threat violence as a first resort. Governors, local authorities and the police must take the strongest possible action to support head teachers.”

NAHT, which represents 30,000 heads and deputies, will give warning at its annual conference today in Telford, Shropshire, that schools are finding it impossible to cope with violent pupils. Extra funding was needed to create safe areas and to provide staff trained to deal with disruptive youngsters.

David Gray, proposer of a motion on pupil behaviour, said that ministers and local authorities were putting the education of other children at risk by encouraging greater inclusion of disruptive pupils in mainstream schools. He said: “If you have just one child that is disruptive, then you are seriously affecting the other 29. It is ruining in many cases those youngsters’ education.”

He added: “A teacher will probably have two minutes per child in a typical lesson for a class of 30. But most of the time is taken up by the disruptive minority, who are getting much more attention, so it almost pays to be a disruptive child.”

Labour and the Conservatives are striving to convince parents that they will be toughest on classroom indiscipline, which has risen rapidly up the election agenda.

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, has pledged “zero tolerance” of disruption and Tim Collins, the Shadow Education Secretary, has promised to create a network of “turnaround schools” for unruly pupils if the Tories are elected.

David Bell, Chief Inspector of Schools in England, said in his most recent annual report that behaviour was unsatisfactory in almost one in ten secondary schools, adding: “In almost all schools there are pupils who have a tendency to behave badly on a repeated basis.”

The NAHT said that it handled 18 incidents of violence and intimidation against heads last month. One head received death threats, and four incidents related to physical assaults by pupils and parents. Five cases involved threats of serious assault from parents or pupils, and eight others led to parents being banned from school premises.

Rona Tutt, the union’s outgoing president, said: “In the past if a pupil was punished for a misdemeanour, the parent’s reaction was to support the school and possibly punish the child again. Now, the reaction is to walk into school and challenge the teacher.”

Mr Gray, head of Babbacombe primary school in Torquay, said that poor behaviour was causing problems at much younger ages than in the past and that Ms Kelly had to appreciate that a genuine zero-tolerance policy would inevitably lead to more expulsions. Yet some local authorities were undermining heads by threatening to call in Ofsted inspectors if they excluded large numbers of children.

Mr Hart said that the overwhelming majority of discipline problems in schools came from “the behaviour of a cohort of children who are simply not observing proper standards”.

“It is common for a parent to say that it is all the teacher’s fault, but the children can come from a home background that is extremely disturbed or which does not seem to be instilling into children basic standards of behaviour,” he said.

Classroom Chaos, a Channel Five documentary screened this week, secretly filmed pupils disrupting lessons and shouting abuse, including sexual inneundos, at the teacher.

The second-largest classroom union, the NASUWT, has estimated that a teacher is verbally abused or physically assaulted in a school every nine minutes. Expulsions declined from 12,700 to 8,300 between 1997 and 2000 as the Government set a target for schools to reduce permanent exclusions by a third.

However, it dropped the target after heads complained that they were having to keep violent youngsters at school. The total rose by 15 per cent within two years to 9,500.

Ms Kelly has postponed plans to compel all schools to accept disruptive pupils.

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