Parents have become more aggressive to teachers and the problem is fuelled by social media, a survey suggests.
The poll of almost 800 teachers found that as many as three quarters thought that parents’ behaviour had worsened in the past five years. Parents were whipping up other families on Facebook and making them anxious about school problems.
The survey of teachers in England and Wales was conducted by YouGov and the TES. David Blow, head teacher of Ashcombe School in Dorking, Surrey, said that situations became exacerbated when details were shared online. “All it takes is something happening locally, or a bad Ofsted — something that a school could have managed really easily five years ago,” he said.
“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 pastoral leader at a Cumbrian secondary school, who did not want to be named, told TES that she regularly received angry messages online. Email had made the biggest difference to the way she was treated by parents, she said.
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“They write it all down and ping it off at one minute past midnight, as aggressive as you like,” she said. “I’ve had a parent say, ‘I’m going to go to the press. I’ll go to the governors. I’ll bring the school to its knees’.”
Among primary teachers, 78 per cent said that parents’ behaviour had deteriorated, compared with 67 per cent at secondary schools.
Chris Keates, general-secretary of NASUWT, the teaching union, said: “Primary parents have traditionally expected greater access to teachers than their secondary counterparts. Primary school teachers are particularly vulnerable to verbal abuse, because often parents are picking up children from school.”