Barely a day goes by without schools being pilloried in the press for poor standards, but a new poll shows that the vast majority of parents are happy with their children’s education.

Four out of five parents - 82 per cent - say they are happy with the quality of education their children receive at school, and nearly half (49 per cent) state that their offspring are being taught to a higher standard than they were before.

The figures are from a survey of 1,000 parents of children aged between 5 and 16.

But despite respondents stating that they were generally happy with their children’s education, more than a quarter (26 per cent) said they would still have preferred to have sent them to a better school.

One of the main reasons for this was down to concerns around disruption in class, with some three-quarters (73 per cent) of parents saying they knew who the “persistent troublemakers” were in their children’s classrooms.

Nearly half (48 per cent) said that their child’s school did not do enough to clamp down on misbehaviour.

Lynda Woolf, a mother of two from South London, was generally happy with the school her children attended, but said that schools did not do enough to combat poor behaviour in general. “There are always one or two who make everyone else’s life a misery. Some teachers are better at tackling them than others,” Ms Woolf said. “But generally schools could take a much tougher line, not only with the children but also with their parents.”

And while the majority of parents were happy with their school, some had concerns around the quality of teaching. Almost two-fifths (39 per cent) felt that their child’s school was not doing enough to tackle weak teaching, and more than half (57 per cent) said they knew who the weakest teachers were.

The survey was carried out by One Poll on behalf of communications firm Gerard Kelly & Partners.