Teachers call for national campaign to tackle violence after being attacked in classrooms

Delegates at the National Education Union (NEU) conference in Brighton voted on Wednesday, April 1 for a motion calling for a national campaign to reduce violence in schools.

This comes after an action plan was announced last year, creating 93 attendance and behaviour hubs across the country to support approximately 3,000 schools, with St Edmund’s Catholic School one of the south east hubs.

During the vote, multiple teachers shared stories of colleagues being assaulted and abused in their schools.

An NEU delegate from Portsmouth proposed the motion, and said this year she has spent “more time managing the dangerous behaviour of a small number of pupils in my class, than delivering the high-quality education that the whole class deserves”.

She explained: “Staff are being grabbed, kicked, punched, spat at, cornered in classrooms, subjected to threats and left managing corridors that feel more like crowd control than education, and pupils are suffering too.

“Children are being assaulted by peers, witnessing frightening incidents and trying to learn in environments where emotional dysregulation becomes the norm because there aren’t enough staff or resources to intervene early or safely.”

Research by the Department for Education revealed teachers and leaders think pupil behaviour at their school has gotten considerably worse since 2021/22, with analysis from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) highlighting teachers are more likely to leave teaching due to bad behaviour.

Laura Ann Watford, also from Portsmouth, told delegates one of her teacher friends “was beaten to the ground by a student and kicked 14 times, 14 times while she was on the floor”.

“Now this teacher, despite being absolutely traumatised and never returning to the classroom, never blamed the child and nor did we,” she added.

Get access to trustworthy local news for a fiver when you sign up for a digital subscription to The News.

An NEU survey of 10,715 members found two in three teachers said bad behaviour by pupils regularly disrupts learning in lessons at school.

The survey found teachers were far more likely to report behaviour regularly disrupting learning than they were before the pandemic.

Levels remain similar to 2024, when 67 per cent of the NEU members surveyed said behaviour was having a negative impact on learning either regularly or all the time.

NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede said: “Schools are running on empty and don’t have enough staffing and pastoral support. Access to Send and mental health specialists is a real challenge and this makes it harder for schools to intervene early.

“Teachers don’t want to see students missing out on education but without the right support and a curriculum that has flexibility and scope for adaptation, too many students can’t cope with expectations.”