A report claims that a third of teachers have been falsely accused of wrongdoing. Our writer argues that it's time parents recognised their responsibilities
27 October 2009 The Times
Who would be a teacher in Britain today? The public may be surprised by a new poll that reveals 28 per cent of school staff have been falsely accused of wrongdoing by pupils, but most professionals who work in schools will not be. Living with parents’ criticism, complaints and false allegations from pupils has become part of a teachers’ lives. They work in a world where pupils feel they can make accusations because their parents will automatically back them, often with far-reaching results.
The poll by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers found that school staff who have been the subject of an unfounded allegation of misconduct by pupils, often have their careers blighted and their private lives damaged.
So how have we got to this situation where the adults involved in education, from parents to teachers, are in a not- so-civil civil war. And how does this affect the children they are trying to serve?
In my view, the first problem is that we now live in a culture where many of us no longer think twice before making a disparaging comment about any grown-ups in front of children. And as parents’ frustration with their children’s schools performance grows, it is the often hard-working teachers on whom they take it out.
Geraldine, for example, is an angry par- ent. This 39-year-old office administrator intends to sue her daughter’s Portsmouth primary school for failing to get Trish through the 11-plus. When I ask her: “Was it really the teachers’ fault?” she dismisses my question with a look of incomprehen- sion. She is, she says, “totally geared up” to “take on” her daughter’s “useless teachers”. But what example does this set Trish?
Tiff, a 41-year-old stay-at-home mum in Kent, is also a confident and seasoned advocate of her three children’s interest. Her latest triumph was to face down her 14-year-old daughter’s headmaster and force him to revoke the detention that she was given for texting in the middle of her science lessons. Tiff is so contemptuous towards her daughter’s headmaster that she calls him a “waste of space”. Her daughter, meanwhile, feels vindicated for her behaviour.
These mothers are just two of many examples of parental misbehaviour. Researching my new book Wasted: Why Education isn’t Educating, during which I spoke to scores of parents, it struck me how quickly they turned into vociferous critics of their children’s school. Often, they responded to a teacher’s criticism of their offspring as if it were a slight on themselves.
And the way grown-ups behave in everyday life does not go unnoticed by children. I have met kids as young as 8 or 9 who feel that they have permission to make fun of and attack their teachers. One group of 14-year-old boys whom I met in Canterbury routinely described their teachers to me as “losers”, “random” and “morons”.
On the other side, many teachers say that they now dread meeting their pupils’ parents. Parents’ evenings have become a battleground where the father or mother is the enemy. Greg, an experienced science teacher who works in a Manchester comprehensive, told me of his well-rehearsed routine for managing the “pushy parent”. “If you take their whining seriously they can turn your world upside-down,” he says. His solution is to “smile, switch off, look agreeable and move on as fast as possible”.
But not all teachers possess Greg’s confidence. Sue has been teaching drama in a Surrey school for two years. During that time she has had several rows with parents. She recalls that the low point of her career so far occurred when she had a shouting match with an angry parent in front of her class. A furious mother stormed into the school hall in the middle of a play rehearsal demanding to know why her son was not offered a more important part.
Another public face-off with an aggressive parent may prompt Sue to sign up for one of the many assertiveness-training courses for teachers that are now a growing strand of in-service instruction. They offer conflict management, mediation and communication skills for teachers requiring support to deal with difficult parents. It is a sign of the times that teachers’ organisations even now have leaflets on topics such as “fear of parents’ evenings”. One leaflet titled, Meet the Parents, published by the Teachers Support Network, cautions that it “can be a daunting experience”. It warns that sometimes parents will “support their child against the school — no matter what”, that they can turn “hostile, defensive and confrontational” and in rare cases even become “aggressive or violent”.
Predictably, sections of the teaching profession have responded to displays of parental disrespect by returning the favour. Educators blame parents for the low achievement and poor behaviour of their children. Without thinking of the damaging consequences for parental authority, many educators too have no inhibitions about ticking off irresponsible parents in front of their kids.
It is difficult to unravel the origins of the divisive feuds among grown-ups that afflict institutions of education. But it is evident to me that these squabbles have been exacerbated by recent government policies. A few months ago, a report published by the MP Alan Milburn argued for harnessing the energy of “pushy parents” to improve standards of education. He echoed the suggestion of the former Education Minister, Lord Adonis, that more pushy parents were needed to force schools to improve. In March, the Government announced a scheme that would allow parents and pupils to use “satisfaction ratings” to grade their school. Such measures risk reinforcing the tendency for parents to vent their frustration on their children’s schools, while failing to provide any constructive measures to improve the quality of education.
Mobilising parents’ instinctive love for their children to shore up the institution of education does not solve deep-seated problems. It simply encourages parents to become their children’s advocates, leading to the widespread adoption of the “my child, right or wrong” attitude. Once such attitudes gain momentum, parents can easily lose sight of what is in the best interest of their child and his or her classmates. One father told me that having challenged the mark that his daughter got for her geography project and questioned the teacher’s judgment, he knew that he had gone too far. “It got to be bigger than a dispute about the grade and it felt wrong,” he says.
It’s not hard to see how parents have got here. With increasing pressure on state schools and growing anxiety about standards, schooling has become a focus of intense competition for parents. Many devote considerable resources to get their children into a “good” school, some paying as much as £2,000 to get legal help with their appeal if children don’t win a place. Rob, 43, a businessman from Birmingham, was appalled when told that his 11-year-old son was refused a place in his school of choice. He appealed and showed up to a panel hearing with a solicitor, who specialised in education law. He says: “I made sure they knew that I meant business.”
Paying for legal advice, moving house to live in the catchment area of a desirable school, or even joining the congregation of a church with an attached school, is now not unusual. Studies indicate that a fifth of secondary pupils in England and Wales receive private tuition. In some middle-class secondary schools more than half of students had used a private tutor. Once the children are in the “right” school, their parents play an active role in helping them with their homework and projects. According to a report by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, two thirds of parents help their children with GCSE coursework — and many do far more than “help”: it is often parents, not the students, who are busy looking for information on the internet or at the library.
Despite all these efforts, petty and divisive bickering between parents and teachers will undermine all the good that parents try to do. If adults behave authoritatively towards youngsters at home and in their communities, teachers will feel comfortable in exercising authority in the classroom. However, if grown-ups point the finger at one another for a school’s alleged failing they undermine not only the authority of the teacher, but of all adults.
Education works best when it is underpinned by a genuine intergenerational conversation. Ideally, through such a conversation, the experience and wisdom of the adult world is transmitted to children. But when grown-ups find it difficult to speak with one voice and education becomes a battlefield on which pointless conflicts between grown-ups are fought, those intergenerational transactions are lost. Teachers and parents need to be on the same side — for the sake of education. Our children and our futures depend on it.
Frank Furedi is a professor of sociology at the University of Kent. His book Wasted: Why Education isn’t Educating is published by Continuum International this week at £16.99. To order it for £15.29, inc p&p, call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.
Mark Ellwood, 46
‘There is a climate of fear in the classroom’
Ellwood was forced to leave his family home and prohibited from contact with his daughters while false allegations against him were investigated.
The former kick-boxing champion helped to look after children removed from class for bad behaviour at David Lister School in Hull. When he asked a 15-year-old boy to put away his mobile phone and take off his coat the pupil threatened to stab him and said: “I will have you killed.”
He marched the teenager out of the classroom but the boy kicked him in the shin. Ellwood “gently” swept the boy to the floor, but did not injure him. The boy’s mother accused Ellwood of assault against her son and within weeks he had been arrested, fingerprinted, held for 22 hours and charged with common assault.
Social services forced him to move out of his home, leaving his wife Julie and two teenage daughters. He slept on the floor of a gym and was banned from contact with them before he was allowed to return two weeks later.
He has just been cleared after nine months by a judge, who said the “nightmare” was now over and Ellwood could rebuild his life.
Ellwood said after the case that there was a such a “climate of fear” in the classroom that teachers are scared to act when threats of stabbing and murder are daily events in schools all over the country.
Jane Watts, 52
‘I felt like a criminal. I couldn’t cope with what happened to me’
Watts had been a primary school teacher for 30 years when the mother of a five-year-old pupil accused her of hitting her daughter on the hand during a lesson.
The next day Watts was suspended from Duke Street Primary School in Chorley, Lancashire, pending an investigation. There had been no witnesses and a teaching assistant in the class at the time did not report anything until the girl’s mother complained, Watts said. “I felt dirty and like a criminal. I’ve always loved teaching and I couldn’t cope with the thought that this had happened to me.”
A month later Watts was arrested for assault. She was interviewed and was released on bail. The police found no case to answer. But the school wanted its own investigation. She took a lie-detector test, which she passed, but the school did not appear to take the results into account.
Watts was sacked in March 2008 for gross misconduct after an internal inquiry, but reinstated on appeal when the punishment was downgraded to a final warning.
The distress caused by the accusation and the investigation meant that Watts was unable to return to school because of ill health and a fear that she would be constantly under suspicion. She was sacked again in June this year for non-attendance.
“The effect it had was that I went from someone who would happily take 220 children for hymn practice and meetings for parents and Inset training, to someone who was afraid to walk around Chorley and didn’t want to go to the local supermarket.”
Judi Sunderland, 60
‘It’s hard to believe it took seconds for this boy to wreck my life’
Sunderland was found innocent by a court after allegations that she had assaulted a pupil. The investigation by the police and then the school took three years after a 13-year-old pupil at Immanuel College school, in Bradford, said that she had attacked him at the end of 2003.
Sunderland had worked at the school for only three months when she heard raised voices in the corridor outside her office and saw a teaching assistant trying to deal with a pupil. She went over and told the boy he should do as he was told.
The pupil slid down the wall and started kicking out so Sunderland, who was in teaching for 33 years, repeated her request for him to behave. He started swearing at her and swiping his legs towards her. Sunderland stood back and the boy got up and she put her arms around him from the back to restrain him. The boy complained and she was accused of using excessive force. The court was told that the case had put her through a “living hell”.
The prosecution gave no evidence against her and she walked free from Bradford Magistrates’ Court. But an internal disciplinary before the school governors decided that she had committed an “unlawful act — but invited her back to teach at the school. As a result, she appealed to the governors about the ruling, but lost the case and then decided to resign. Because of this ruling she was prevented from chaperoning her own grandchildren to drama lessons.
“The whole incident lasted seconds. It’s hard to believe it took less than a minute for this boy to wreck my life.”
Shakil Akhter, 42
‘The past two years for me have been a nightmare’
Science teacher Akhter was sacked from the International School & Community College, Birmingham, after a 12-year-old boy with a history of trouble making told the headmistress that the teacher had hit him.
The father of four, denied the allegations — made in December 2005 — and the police and social services did not pursue the claims after a two-year investigation.
But the school suspended Akhter, who has a PhD in forestry, and after an internal inquiry later sacked him six months after he joined the staff.
The GTC, the profession’s watchdog, ruled that there was not enough evidence that the teacher had thrown a punch and said that a teaching assistant in the classroom had not seen him do so.
Akhter could not take the local education authority — Birmingham City Council — to an employment tribunal because he had not been at the school long enough to bring proceedings against it.
Akhter said after he was cleared:
“It’s hard to think that they chose to believe this boy over me. I’m very relieved. The past two years for me have been a nightmare because I took on a lot of debt to train as a teacher, but now I can try and rebuild my life.”
