A FEMALE teacher stops a 15-year-old in a crowded school corridor because he is barging into younger pupils and creating mayhem.
He turns round and spits in her hair.
Another teacher takes a youngster out of a class because he is shouting and throwing paper around. As he tells him off the boy suddenly announces: "You hit me. You can't do that."
He is lying, but later that day the teacher is told by an assistant head he has been reported for assault.
Real incidents in real local schools . . . and now, in a major new report, more than 80 per cent of teachers have confirmed that pupil behaviour has deteriorated during their time in teaching.
As the crisis grows, East Lancashire heads have joined teachers' leaders in calling for urgent Government action.
The report, by researchers at Warwick University, says teachers blame lack of good parenting and parental support for schools as a major reason for the increasing lack of discipline. One in 12 even said they had been threatened by a parent in the last three months.
Michael Humphreys, head of Our Lady and St John RC High School in Blackburn, said: "Schools are no longer the calm and orderly places that they were. Teachers are constantly subjected to challenge and often to abuse that would have been unheard of 10 years ago.
"Teachers are rightly fed up with the lack of discipline they face."
Meanwhile, Anthony McNamara, head of St Augustine's RC High School in Billington, said: "There are a growing number of vicious assaults and spurious allegations against teachers in our schools."
And at Darwen Moorland High, chairman of governors John Jacklin said: "Most secondary schools, including Moorland, have a minority of pupils who misbehave on a regular basis.
"They swear and spit at teachers and when they are reprimanded that they react with sheer insolence and sometimes violence.
"This continual misbehaviour interrupts classes, and is bound to have a knock-on effect on the education of the majority of well-behaved students who want to learn.
"These disruptive pupils should be removed and educated elsewhere."
Simon Jones, divisional secretary with the National Union of Teachers in Blackburn with Darwen, called for action. "We need more primary and secondary day and residential schools for pupils who have emotional and behavioural problems. And headteachers who have a discipline crisis in their school should be able to call on outside trained staff for advice."
And he said the union was calling for headteachers to have the right to refer for assessment youngsters whom they believe may have problems -- before they even let them into their school.
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