Go Teaching and Get Bashed

By CATHERALL, Sarah

New Zealand classrooms are becoming hazardous workplaces as teachers fall victim to violence and bullying, raising issues of safety and driving teachers from their jobs. Sarah Catherall reports.

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THE trainee science teacher arrived in the classroom science lab at the start of the year bursting with energy and ideas. But last week, the young woman finally resigned from her central North Island school, exhausted by two terms of swearing and yelling from the 13 to 16 year olds in her care.

In the worst case, she was shoved by a burly pupil she had sent out of the classroom for misbehaviour.

“I was pushed by kids several times, boys and girls. I just felt like crap,” she says.

The teacher, who would not be named and is unsure whether she’ll ever enter a classroom again, says she felt scared to go to work. She struggled to sleep. And she was so worried about hazardous chemicals that she regularly cancelled classroom experiments.

She had studied behaviour management as part of her teaching diploma but nothing prepared her for the environment at the decile- three college. On bad days, she spent up to 90 per cent of each lesson just managing the kids. Eventually, she took three weeks’ sick leave before quitting.

“My teaching course tries to teach you about pupil behaviour, but it’s like teaching a mechanic without a car,” she says.

Her boss, the head of the science department, who also wants to remain anonymous, says: “This sort of behaviour is happening all the time and it’s getting worse. My concern is for the safety of staff.”

He’s not alone. Around the country, classrooms are increasingly hazardous workplaces. Statistics reveal that teachers are increasingly the victims of school bullies. But if you think the problem is confined to secondary schools, think again.

Pupil violence is filtering through to primary and intermediate schools. A report commissioned by the primary and intermediate teachers’ union, the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI), reveals one in seven primary and intermediate school teachers was physically assaulted by pupils last year. It says teachers were scratched, pushed, shoved, punched, kicked and bitten.

In one primary school, 13 staff were attacked last year. And half of teachers and more than a quarter of support staff were verbally assaulted by pupils.

“We found these results both disturbing and concerning,” says NZEI vice-president Frances Nelson.

The survey was commissioned because of a rise in cases dealt with by NZEI regional offices last year.

“The student behaviour is unacceptable and unsafe for teachers and for other students,” says Ms Nelson. “I don’t believe that most parents would accept that kind of behaviour from their own or other people’s children, nor do I believe that teachers and support staff should accept it, either.”

Support staff — typically teacher aides and other non-teaching staff — were most likely to be regularly assaulted, with more than a third being pushed, shoved or shouldered more than 20 times, often by special needs pupils. In 29 most recent cases, teachers responded in one or more ways, restraining pupils (16 cases), calling for help (11), leaving the room (nine) and protecting other pupils (seven). Two support staff had to go to a doctor’s surgery and one didn’t return to school that day. One took sick leave.

In the NZEI report, titled Physical and Verbal Aggression Towards Primary and Secondary Staff, one support staff member reveals: “I was under constant stress trying to protect myself and other children. It was physically demanding, too.”

When pupils become a classroom hazard, the Labour Department is alerted. There have been seven such incidents since 2004 and they make disturbing reading.

Last year, a primary teacher was punched two or three times in the ribs by an angry pupil who was about to attack another pupil. The year before, a primary teacher lost part of a fingernail when trying to break up a fight between two pupils.

A primary teacher bitten by an autistic pupil who had headbutted another teacher the same day needed time off for the infected wound. In 2005, an out-of-control child went on a classroom rampage, attacking other kids, hitting the teacher on the arm with a chair when she intercepted. That same year, a teacher fractured her hand when a special needs pupil attacked her.

Statistics for last year show a rise in the number of kids suspended or stood down for verbally assaulting staff and bashing them. Pupils were suspended, stood down or kicked out of school nearly 30,000 times last year. Of these, 3637 — more than 10 per cent — were caught verbally assaulting staff. More pupils bashed teachers and support staff, too — up 11.9 per cent — and there were 809 suspensions and stand- downs for assaults on school staff.

IN THE worst schools, teachers are armed with cellphones and walkie- talkies in their rooms and in playgrounds. Teachers are most likely to be bullied in low-decile and co-educational high schools, according to a Post-Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) 2004 study, which found that 15 per cent of secondary teachers were physically assaulted in the previous year.

The PPTA is advocating zero tolerance to pupil violence, and advises teachers to walk out of class with other pupils if safety is threatened.

It believes teachers are exposed to aggressive and violent pupils more often than most other employees, including doctors and lawyers, and fears it’s a factor in teacher retention.

PPTA president Robin Duff is calling for more resources and help for teachers, even though the Government already spends $175 million a year tackling bad behaviour.

As the NZEI comments in another report, Disruptive Student Behaviour, to be tabled at its annual meeting in September, there’s a growing pool of information, resources and research to help schools with badly behaved kids, though this has so far been disjointed.

The Government has launched a $1 million annual programme — the interim response fund — that has so far provided quick funding and crisis support to 300 pupils with behavioural problems this year, keeping them in schools with the help of teacher aides and other specialists.

Asked whether teacher assaults are rising, Education Ministry operations policy manager Jim Matheson says: “There are a lot of anecdotes in this field . . . There’s always been a level of unacceptable behaviour and that’s no different now than when I was at school. We’re always concerned when teachers or principals are threatened, though.”

AT rural Inglewood Primary School, in Taranaki, a positive behaviour programme is money well spent at $33,000 a year, with a 35 per cent drop in bad behaviour this year, including teacher bullying. Associate principal Karen Houghton has 12 years’ experience but, even so, says she was not prepared when a pupil turned up with a baseball bat last year. This year, the school has dealt with two cases of physical assault on teachers.

In a past job, Ms Houghton had a chair thrown in her direction, was spat at, bitten and scratched. “You have situations where a child can go from mumbling under their breath to a full-blown incident. It’s frightening for other teachers and staff, and also for parents.

“Our focus is to keep the child from harming himself or others, and they have to be pulled from the room and taken elsewhere. I’ve also had to evacuate the kids from the room and leave the child there,” she says.

Classroom stress is taking its toll. Schools say teachers can increasingly pick jobs in better schools to lessen the risk of being physically or verbally abused. Low- decile schools often struggle to fill vacancies. In the Porirua basin, one primary school principal, who did not wish to be identified, has advertised three times for an assistant principal and there’s still a vacancy. In her 100-pupil school, a quarter of the pupils are the children of Mongrel Mob members. “It may be acceptable to say ‘Oh, you f…’ at home and in the street, but we’re having to teach them that it’s not okay here.”

The NZEI survey showed police were called into schools for four out of 21 teacher assaults last year. But in the Wellington and Wairarapa regions, there are signs that schools are dealing with the problem in-house, according to a police spokeswoman.

Despite this, there’s concern that many teachers feel vulnerable, with 29 per cent of secondary teachers occasionally feeling unsafe in schools last year and 2 per cent frequently feeling this way, according to a survey by the Council for Educational Research.

Chief researcher Cathy Wylie says: “Here, we are at work in an office and if we said we felt unsafe that would not be very good. It’s a workplace safety issue. It’s not a reign of terror, or the kids taking over the school, but it’s saying there’s something worth paying some attention to.”

Secondary schools with high suspension rates report that behaviour management is a big part of the job. In Lower Hutt, Naenae College hit a record last year, with the most suspensions in the lower North Island — it sent pupils away from school 35 times, for everything from theft and vandalism, to assault and disobedience.

There, teachers are trained to follow “a game plan” if pupils get violent. Principal John Russell says: “They have a routine that they follow. There’s a responsibility to take the student out to create a safe environment, and in the worst case you evacuate and leave everyone else, though I can’t recall that having to be done.”

The NZEI survey of 271 principals, teachers and support staff provides evidence to support a trend teachers have been increasingly reporting — that primary school pupils are striking out at teachers. It found boys were to blame for nine of every 10 teacher assaults, with year one to three pupils the worst. Teachers were often struck when they tried to stop pupils hurting others or the pupil challenged directions — though more than a quarter of attacks were unprovoked.

Teachers were also confronted by aggressive parents and caregivers. In what the reviewer said was a surprising finding, a third of principals said staff were yelled at, sworn at and screamed at by this group.

One principal says children can’t learn to respect school authorities if their caregivers don’t.

“You have parents who say in front of their kids, ‘I’ll go down and sort that school out.’ I’m not sure where the greater stress and worry comes from. That kind of parent or the child.”

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(c) 2007 Dominion Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.