schools in North Lanarkshire reported 245 incidents of violence towards education staff last session, up 10 per cent on the previous year.
Michael O’Neill, the council’s director of education, warned ministers that this was a major challenge to the inclusion of increasing numbers of troubled pupils in mainstream classes.
Parents of the youngest children seem to have no less a taste for confrontation with teachers. The biggest rise in incidents - of just over 30 per cent - was in primary schools and included 27 cases of pupils punching staff. Only three more incidents were reported in the authority’s 26 secondary schools, with three schools responsible for 44 per cent of cases.
Figures submitted to the education committee showed that more than half of 102 incidents reported by 41 of the council’s 130 primary schools indicated some form of physical violence, “usually involving body contact”. Most featured repeat offenders and were more likely to involve parents or adults directing abuse at a headteacher.
Repeat offenders also featured prominently in the secondary statistics where a third of the 107 cases reported involved verbal confrontation and just over a fifth resulted in physical violence, ranging from “bumping into” and “pushing past” to “being hit by a missile”, “threw chair” and “charged at a teacher”.
Mr O’Neill said that a small number of schools with a significant number of repeat offenders “can distort the figures”.
But he said that the statistics are in line with what he expected and, though there are a variety of patterns, the general trend is up. “Our figures are no different from other parts of the country and constitute a challenge to the Government’s inclusion agenda.”
There was, however, only a slight increase in schools for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties, usually involving deliberate physical violence against a teacher, and a decrease in reported incidents in special schools.
Eighty-one per cent of pupil assailants were male as were 65 per cent of parent perpetrators, compared to last session when the majority of parents were female. More than half (56 per cent) of incidents were committed by pupils between the ages of nine and 15.
The most recent national statistics for the 2000-01 session, issued in January, showed violent incidents against school staff were up from 3,083 to 4,501.
