TEACHERS across the country are enduring a daily diet of verbal and physical abuse from children as young as 5 as discipline in schools worsens across the country, the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers heard yesterday.

Voting unanimously to expel violent and disruptive pupils permanently from schools, the NASUWT members said that being sworn at, punched, stabbed with compasses and breaking up fights were now the stuff of daily life in many schools.

The vote, by the country’s second-largest teaching union, came after David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools, gave warning last month of a growing discipline crisis in schools.

David Ward, a teacher from Sheffield who moved the motion, painted a picture of worsening discipline in schools up and down the country. In one school, children were spitting at teachers from the third floor, while at another, he said, the fire alarm had been set off 40 times in one day.

“There is a picture of an increasing amount of ill- discipline, sometimes low-level, often not, of ineffective school policies and of unsupportive school management teams,” Mr Ward said.

Members said that the abuse was not restricted to secondary schools and that some primary school heads were appearing to reward unruly behaviour. Ralph Robins, a primary school liaison officer in Cornwall, said that one pupil who had consistently verbally abused staff and refused to follow orders had been given alternative activities, such as model-making and playing on the computer.

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