“Fuck off!”

The angry hostility of those two words is as jarring in print as it must be when flung at a teacher by a pupil. Teaching is a caring, altruistic profession, and to be on the end of verbal abuse from someone you are trying to help can be hugely disheartening, not to mention stressful or even frightening.

And, according to many of the 1,079 teachers who responded to a survey by the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, these sort of incidents are on the rise. Many feel that aggressive swearing is now commonplace in school, with few if any sanctions applied when it happens.

One teacher summed up a widespread view about pupils’ behaviour in school: “I feel as though you are expected to be threatened in my council and you are expected to accept it. Even on a bus a sign says, ‘Any assault against our staff will be followed by legal proceedings.’ Teaching is the only job where any form of assault is not followed through.”

Other teachers made a similar point: in GP surgeries, in supermarkets, even on other council premises, there is zero tolerance of abuse to staff. So why is it different in schools?

Of course, now more than ever, schools are aware of the underlying issues that may be driving violent or abusive behaviour. A few years ago, at an EIS teaching union event on child poverty, a children’s charity boss recalled an incident in which a boy, after receiving a dressing down for not having his PE kit, exploded and told the teacher to fuck off. Later, the backstory emerged: the boy’s alcoholic father had come in late the previous night and eaten the boy’s dinner - a tin of tomato soup, the only food in the cupboard.

Duty of care

The fact that schools and education authorities now take the troubles behind the behaviour much more into account is a sign of progress. However, many respondents in the survey often felt that they did not get enough support when faced with violence from pupils; some even suggested that the reporting processes were deliberately complex and time-consuming, to discourage staff from using them.

The Scottish government seeks to reassure us by saying that only 2 per cent of secondary teachers had experienced a physical assault in the past year. Well, going by the recent teacher census, that still amounts to nearly 500 teachers. One teacher, who saw a colleague struck in the face by a pupil wielding a book, said that, after the pupil was merely removed from class for two days, “I do not feel confident that if I were to be physically assaulted, the school would fulfil its duty of care to me.”

Many teachers complain that behaviour problems reflect schools’ inability to cope with the demands of the national inclusion policy, whereby the presumption is that, severe cases aside, all children will take part in mainstream education.

However, poverty is on the rise again, budget cuts are starting to bite and problems with school staffing have become the norm. We have reached a point where even a self-described “fervent supporter of inclusive education”, a former schools inspector, can tell the parliamentary inquiry on poverty and attainment that inclusion, in practice, is proving “close to impossible to deliver”.

When teachers are faced with violence from pupils who are struggling at school, it is not good enough for them to be told they must put up with it “because, inclusion”. Often this challenging behaviour is a sign that pupils are floundering because the right support is not there. That’s not inclusion - and it’s not fair on them, their peers or teachers.

Henry Hepburn is news editor for Tes Scotland. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn