Later this week we will send
a letter to parents asking them to be mindful of staff wellbeing when
contacting the school. Some staff report that the number of incidents of highly
challenging e mails or phone calls have increased and this is noted across the
world of education generally. The TES covered the issue earlier this year:
Three-quarters
of teachers believe parents’ behaviour towards them has grown worse over the
last five years, according to an exclusive poll for TES. Among the primary and secondary staff questioned by YouGov,
only 2 per cent said that parents’ behaviour had improved since 2010. And 25
per cent said that there had been no change at all in the way that parents
behaved.
By contrast, 73
per cent of the teachers surveyed said that parents’ behaviour had become
worse. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said that
she was unsurprised by this. “Primary school teachers are particularly
vulnerable to verbal abuse, because often parents are picking up children from
school,” she said. “But secondary teachers also find themselves being verbally
abused in meetings with parents.”
Many teachers
believe that the advent of social media
has exacerbated the problem. David Blow, headteacher of the Ashcombe School in
Dorking, Surrey, said: “All it takes is something happening locally, or a bad
Ofsted – something that a school could have managed really easily five years
ago.
“Now, a couple
of parents start up a Facebook page and the anxiety can spread. Something
that’s in print is much harder to deal with than something people are just
talking to each other about.” A representative sample of 796 classroom teachers
and headteachers from England and Wales were surveyed for the poll.
