Abuse in England's schools not as frequent as suggested

26 June 2014

How widespread is intimidation and verbal abuse in England's classrooms? This morning's papers disagree.

The Mail and Telegraph say 6.5% of secondary headteachers report it as a weekly occurrence in their school. For the Times however the situation looks markedly worse: 6.5% of teachers face it on a daily basis:

teachers discipline

The survey findings upon which these stories are based - released by the OECD this morning - actually show everyone's got the wrong end of the stick.

It surveyed headteachers at lower secondary schools and asked if pupil intimidation and verbal abuse against staff occurred in their school "at least weekly" - not necessarily "daily" as the Times indicates. To get to 6.5%, the researchers then counted the proportion of teachers working in these schools.

However this doesn't mean that every teacher in these schools receives this abuse on a weekly basis, just that at least one of their colleagues is likely to have faced it in any given week. We don't know the proportion of these schools where this abuse is a daily occurrence.

England remains high up the international league table when compared to surveyed countries' rates.

There's a smattering of evidence on the level of abusive pupils in England, although it's limited to looking at occurrences in the past year rather than on a weekly or daily basis. 44% of teachers reported being subjected to verbal abuse by a pupil, according to a NASUWT survey from 2013.

Similarly a survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in 2012 found that 37% of education staff had to deal with intimidation from pupils in the previous academic year and 54% had dealt with verbal insults or threats.

Update (1 July 2014)

After we got in touch with them, the Mail made contact with one of the OECD's researchers to confirm that it was a survey of headteachers rather than teachers, and pointed us to part of the report that outlines the methodology. Given this we were happy for the newspaper to retain its original wording.

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