A schools tsar has blamed parents for their children running riot amid a rise in classroom violence across the UK.
British schools are currently having to clamp down on students’ behaviour during the school day due to their parents’ lax approach to at-home discipline.
The Department for Education’s ambassador for attendance and behaviour Tom Bennett has stressed there are now simmering tensions between parents and teachers over who was responsible for their children’s behaviour.
Over the course of the autumn term in 2024, around 16,000 students were suspended for assaulting an adult – a higher figure than children taken out of school across an entire year 10 years ago.
Now, teachers and other staff members are even having to accommodate raucous children by wearing bite sleeves.
Mr Bennett told The Times: “Some parents have very weak boundaries with their own children.
“They allow them to be on their iPads and phones all day and think that that’s loving and caring because that’s what they want and ‘it’s making my child happy’.
“Schools are saying, no, we are going to do it [discipline] like this and that parenting gap is where a lot of this comes from. Parents and schools have moved in different directions.”
Some staff have to wear bite sleeves to work due to the rise in assaults
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GETTY
Staff have warned parents choosing to “gentle parent” is the culprit for the rise in classroom violence.
Mr Bennett added that parents believe that children will behave “if you just speak nicely to children” but, in reality, he said this is a scarce occurrence.
Over the 2024/2025 school year, formal complaints about schools have risen by 82 per cent across five years, with parents flagging a whopping five million grievances to educators.
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