We need to value our teachers

'Nine out of 10 teachers say that bullying parents are a bigger threat to discipline in the schools than thuggish pupils'

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Morris blames bad parenting for 'cycle of disrespect' among children

Storm clouds gather over schools as teachers revive spirit of the Eighties

Leading article: Fine feckle

I would advise the eminently sensible though somewhat earnest Estelle Morris to wear body armour after Wednesday, when she is expected to say to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers that violence and bad behaviour among pupils in schools is, in part, the fault of brutish parents who stride into schools to intimidate, abuse, threaten and sometimes attack staff members, usually after their children have been disciplined for a misdemeanour.

Good, I say, it's about time this was acknowledged. I only hope that the Government really means to take up arms against this growing problem and that this is not just a politically expedient speech tailored to make teachers feel more wanted by New Labour, which they are, desperately.

We should all care that teachers, especially if they are women, or if they are physically small and mild mannered, are regularly undermined and bullied by hardcore pupils and their parents, sometimes with appalling consequences. Just last week there were reports of a pregnant teacher, Amy Blackburn, in a school in London who had a miscarriage after she was attacked by violent pupils. In the last few years there have been similar cases, one involving a brilliant black female teacher who suffered hellishly in the hands of racist pupils and their parents.

In a survey carried out last autumn, nine out of 10 teachers said bullying parents were a bigger threat to discipline and harmony in schools than thuggish pupils. We don't hear nearly enough about the numbers of teachers who suffer breakdowns and long-term injuries.

Many are eventually forced into early retirements. Some develop serious phobias, and others end up with an irreversible collapse of self-esteem, their original idealism and enthusiasm in shreds and only bitter disillusionment to keep them company. Our rising expectations have made many of us impatient with teachers and schools and this is why various governments have set demanding standards to improve our education system. This was and is right and necessary. But the loose and spiteful rhetoric used to achieve this has resulted in a cruel scapegoating of all teachers for far too many years.

Teachers have been endlessly reproached by the Government, by commentators such as Chris Woodhead, the former inspector of schools, and politicians like Dianne Abbot (who only last week appeared to be arguing that black boys behaving badly in schools do what they do because teachers are either too racist or too frightened to make them behave properly). It's OK to be disrespectful to teachers, we've been told, because they are hopeless no-gooders.

Some use fists and filth to express this disrespect, others (including some maniacal middle class parents) treat teachers as if they were private tutors to their own perfect little – or overgrown – poppets, who should never need to be punished.

My son went to a posh school where there was once an incident involving him and three other boys. No violent abuse had taken place, but they did wrong. They were all suspended, quite rightly in my view. For seven days my son (who was full of ire) was made to understand why the school was right to name and shame and temporarily remove him. Some of the other parents were outraged and demanded a retraction that they didn't get, but their sound and fury unsettled the teachers and might have encouraged further rule-breaking among the boys.

It took a powerful, tearful letter from one reader to make me realise how little attention we have paid to the devalued lives of these professionals. The letter came from a former teacher, a man who was attacked by a gang in his class in an inner city school. They broke his glasses, pushed the fragments into his eyes and then kicked him and two other pupils who tried to stop them. All three victims were hospitalised.

The parents of one of the pupils who attacked the teacher found out where he lived and started a campaign of hatred. They burnt his car and delivered two live rats in a small box through his letterbox, with labels of gruesome warning tied around their necks.

He cannot use one eye and is so afraid to make a new life that he has buried himself alive in a small flat in Vauxhall. His 18-page letter contained many other examples of abuse and attacks suffered by teachers he knows. He even included their phone numbers. I have no reason to disbelieve any of his stories.

On the specific issue of parental abuse of teachers, there can be no excuse, no understanding, no compromise. Yet there are already people reacting with rage that Ms Morris is accusing "feckless" parents of causing all the criminal behaviour among the young paraded daily in the press these days. If she is doing so, she is wrong. A blanket culpability thrown over all parents of anti-social children and young people would be unjust.

Some children abuse their parents too and you often find that in the same family, one or two children turn out impossible while the others are fine. In families where domestic violence is commonplace, some children come to believe that that is how all social relations are conducted.

Victimised parents are often unable to influence such violent children. It is important to remember too that the furious parent who storms into schools to beat up the teacher for punishing his child, probably believes he or she has an absolute right to assault the same child at home. A new NSPCC report says that there has been a 40 per cent rise in the unlawful deaths of children and young people in the past 12 months and that many of the killers were family members.

Compelling evidence provided by social researchers, such as David Utting, confirms that poor parenting and a culture of criminality and violence within some families causes delinquency and criminal behaviour in the children. Then there is relative poverty, and the greed and madness this generates, especially among young people who want things that they can only get by taking them from others, or by getting into the drugs businesses that flourish on all our housing estates.

The Social Inclusion Unit and other agencies are trying to address these problems. And there are innovative schemes that can make up the parental deficits in the lives of the young bullies. Some schools have successfully run teacher-pupil discussion and emotional literacy groups; others have developed parent-teacher partnerships, working with child psychotherapists to make for better interactions between all the parties. Drama workshops are used in some schools too, and with fantastic results.

All fine and good and worthy. But these initiatives cannot replace the hard responses we now need from the Government to make our teachers feel safe and valued again. Without these we will simply be raising more barbarians within school walls (who in turn will make more vicious bullies for an even bleaker future), and people with talents, skills and commitment will never consider taking up teaching as a career however much money is put on the table.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk