THEY’RE rude, inconsiderate, aggressive, unreliable, needy and demanding. And that’s just the parents.

In our ever-more fragmented society, heads and teachers are coming under increased pressure from a growing number of parents who seem to think that schools are there not only to offer their children a flawless education, but also to solve family disputes, give legal and financial advice, write references, and offer counselling.

And woe betide the school that fails to meet their demands. Very few parents resort to the violent extremes which characterised the case of Diane and John Bell - jailed for nine months earlier this year for imprisoning Sylvia Moore, their daughter’s headteacher, in her office. However, many are quick to wave their fists, or their legal rights, in the face of whoever crosses them.

Physical assaults and serious threats were made against at least 140 school heads last year, many of them by parents, according to the National Association of Head Teachers. The union has recovered half a million pounds in claims for criminal injuries compensation for its members since January 1999. And a TES survey carried out last January found that 13 per cent of teachers have been confronted by parents. Legal cases are also escalating, with parents now taking action against schools over issues such as disappointing A-level results.

And underneath these visible tips of the iceberg is an unquantifiable mass of belligerent, resentful, unco-operative and ineffectual parents whose behaviour will never make headlines, but who are an immense drain on teachers’ time and energy.

“It’s school rage. It’s very undermining,” says Clarissa Williams, head of Tolworth Girls School in Surrey, who has seen some of her teachers “reduced at parents’ evening to quivering wrecks”.

The school fields a growing number of complaints from parents who believe that teachers are responsible for all aspects of their child’s welfare, such as that from a mother who said a teacher should have put sun cream on a child on a school outing. It also has one or two parents who throw things around the office.

But the most difficult to deal with by far, says Ms Williams, “are the angry, middle-class ones who want to blame someone and who almost seem willing to sacrifice their own child to make a point.”

A survey of 2,500 teachers from 13 local education authorities, recently analysed by Warwick University for the National Union of Teachers, shows that such behaviour is widespread. One secondary school teacher said: “A lot of poor behaviour in our school is condoned by parents and is also a direct result of instructions parents give their children. For example, if they get in trouble in class they must walk out of the lesson and phone home.”

Primary teachers often echo these views. One said: “Some parents need attention more than kids - we are a handy scapegoat for them to shout at.” Another commented that children “resent authority even in the nursery, and their parents are even more resentful”.

In the journal Conference amp; Common Room under the headline “The head will see you now”, Nigel Richardson, head of the independent Perse school in Cambridge, documented the ever-growing demands on his time from parents, including adjudicating between two rival groups of parents over an out-of-school dispute, giving three hours of counselling to a distressed parent, fielding a phone call at home one Sunday lunchtime from a parent looking for a school, who phoned at that time because he had a “rather a busy week ahead”, and being asked to drop everything to look for a pair of lost trainers.

Most parents, stresses Mr Richardson, are not like this, but family strains and fragmentation are creating more problems. Parents are less certain than they were about how to deal with teenagers and many work a long way from home. As a result, schools are becoming familiar with the Monday morning fax or email, which arrives before 10am, in the wake of a hurried family conference the night before. “A key aspect of our job seems increasingly to be asked to say and do things to pupils which parents don’t want to in case they create conflict at home, and also to build bridges again when conflict arises.”

This is borne out by the work of sociologist Frank Furedi of the University of Canterbury, who believes that today’s adults are suffering “a crisis of parental nerve” - too timid to reprimand their own children and so scared of “stranger danger” that they feel they have to protect their youngsters from everything.

So what can schools do to ward off parents from hell? The Government has proposed to extend parenting orders so they can be used to make parents responsible for the behaviour of their children in school, and is currently consulting on how it and the LEAs can give schools more support.

It is unwilling to back excluding the children of violent adults from school. But many teachers see the need for more powers, such as a greater commitment from LEAs to ban troublesome parents from school. “It needs a stronger line from senior government officials,” says Martin Liddle, head of Stoke High School, Suffolk, who says that today’s parents have a strong sense of rights without an equally strong sense of their responsibilities.

Mr Richardson says heads must become more robust about saying no “when it’s the parents’ role”. He also suggests - and not entirely frivolously - that one way to curb parental excesses might be to make them pay for services rendered: marriage guidance pound;100 an hour; passport counter-signature pound;25; career advice for former pupils pound;100... After all, doctors charge fees for services such as travel inoculations, and GPs are no longer required to act as witnesses for drivers’ licenses and passports, releasing up to an estimated 0.75 million of GP hours a year. GPs also often print long lists of patient responsibilities, as well as rights, in the surgery brochures.

However, schools know that they need to work with parents if they are to do the best for pupils, and are reluctant to take any steps which would make them appear hostile. One way forward might be to improve parent-teacher exchanges. Barbara Walker, an education researcher at the University of East Anglia, has examined parents’ evenings at secondary schools and found them fraught with problems of “time, space, temperature, children having to be left at home alone, and teachers tired from a long day”. Also, as one teacher put it: “You know they’ve got an axe to grind, you just don’t know what it is.” As a result, teachers tend to fill the time with defensive talk, leaving parents frustrated.

Improved training for new teachers in talking to parents might help, Ms Walker suggests, as would encouraging each side to be more sensitive to the difficulties faced by the other.

Andrew Cunningham, who teaches English at Cranleigh School in Surrey, agrees. “As a teacher, I hardly open my mouth at my children’s parent evenings, I’m so aware of how it feels on the other side of the desk.” He believes that closer, everyday communication between teachers and parents could do a lot to defuse the confrontational element of such events, and that informal and time-efficient e-mails might be the way of the future.

Yet for many schools, strong relations with parents - problems and all - are the foundation of all they do. Eric Gates, who won a teaching award for turning round Chantry primary school in Gravesend, Kent, said building bridges with parents underpinned everything he did. He sent them a weekly newsletter and opened a community library in school.

“I had a lovely relationship with them. I didn’t mind the problems. I thought it was good that they had confidence in me and the school. We had a social worker based in school at one time, but it didn’t work. They always seemed to prefer to come to me.”

VIOLENCE AGAINST HEADS AND TEACHERS

* Michael Iliffe, head of Foxborough middle school, Lowestoft, suffered a fractured skull when parent Andrew Altham kicked him in the head after a remark made by the school’s deputy about Altham’s lateness in picking up his child from a school disco. Altham, who had been drinking and smoking cannabis at the time of the attack, was jailed for two and a half years this September.

* Sylvia Moore, head of Francis Coombe middle school, Watford, was imprisoned in her office and threatened by parents John and Diana Bell, after their 12-year-old daughter was sent home for refusing to take out her nose ring. The Bells were jailed for nine months earlier this year.

* A rounders game at a Wolverhampton school ended in a brawl involving 40 people last summer. Teacher Toni Ellis spent two days in hospital after being hit on the head with a bat.

PARENTAL PRESSURES

An everyday story of one small village primary school in the south-east of England where teachers have recently been asked to:

* give counsel and support to divorcing partners

* sign passport photographs

* persuade pupils to wear sensible shoes (“Could you do it? I can’t make her.”)

* give pupils medicines

* mend shoes (“Her sole’s coming away. Can you just put a staple there?”)

* hand out bunches of thank-you letters and party invitations

* look for missing trumpets, trainers, keys, sweatshirts... (“He said he left it in your class.”)

* set up a different booster class for a pupil whose parent says the regular one doesn’t fit her schedule

* stay and look after pupils whose parents turn up an hour or more late to pick them up from school (“I’m stuck in traffic.”)

* talk to a pupil who has left the school about why she doesn’t like her secondary school - then phone her secondary school tutor to sort out the problems.

* act as a post office, holding post and parcels for other parents

* talk to a pupil about death, after a pet died

* persuade a child to go swimming (“He won’t listen to me.”)

* look after children sent to school even though they are ill

* give special tutoring in decimals for a boy due to take an external exam that the school advised against

* deal with an abusive and threatening father

* sort out friendship disputes among pupils

“All these things are so much a matter of course we don’t even think about it,” said one class teacher. “But it’s much worse than it used to be. A lot of the problem is the access people have now to schools. We’ve bent over backwards to tell parents that if they have a problem they must come and talk to us about it, and so they think we’re here to do everything.”