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Violence against teachers has become a silent epidemic in education. Although it generates headlines, education authorities seem reluctant to tackle its systemic causes. And while they hesitate, teacher stress levels are increasing and good teachers are leaving.
The figures present a worrying picture. In NSW in 2001, 42 teachers required medical attention after being assaulted by students, according to documents yielded under the Freedom of Information Act; in a 2000 Western Australian survey, 30 per cent of teachers said they felt bullied by their students; while in Victoria in one year from June 2001, teachers made 217 successful stress-based claims under WorkCover, a 30 per cent jump since 1999.
The NSW Teachers Federation, frustrated by a lack of action from the Department of Education and Training, demanded documents that would reveal the depth of the problem. The federation believes the department has failed to meet its obligations under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, does not keep accurate records about this issue and does not put in place system-wide, preventative measures.
While such violence frequently occurs at schools in disadvantaged areas, private colleges are not immune—one Melbourne private school this year resorted to a 'code blue' lockdown due to student violence.
Yet there seems little political will to find a solution. "Left and right have different understandings of violence as a phenomenon," says Lindsay Fitzclarence, associate dean of Education Studies at Monash University. "The right privileges personal responsibility and family responsibility. Since the Howard Liberal government came in, benchmark documents [such as Sticks and Stones: Report on Violence in Australian Schools from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training from 1994] have been gathering dust."
Fitzclarence says new teachers rarely graduate with the classroom skills to deal with student aggression. Fitzclarence teaches these skills in his classes, but this is not a national requirement in teacher education. "We have people with shorter fuses, with overloaded, complex lives and complex relationships without a coherent narrative to hold that complexity together," Fitzclarence says.
"Schools are infinitely more complex than 10 years ago, too. Principals are under pressure, teachers are under more pressure, kids coming into class are under more pressure. It's a time bomb. Young teachers walk in unprepared, and
I think our in-service programs are band-aids. We don't have the comprehensive program to put things in place."
Frank Barnes, organiser for the NSW Teachers Federation, says there is anecdotal evidence that stress leave as a result of attacks on gays and lesbian teachers is increasing. "Most of the time, harassment is at a low level—usually verbal," he says, adding that this is far from benign. "The NSW Anti-Discrimination Board describes a hierarchy: name-calling precedes violence and then murder. It's part of the actual process."
According to Barnes, the problem is not the lack of good anti-homophobia programs. The NSW Teachers Federation has produced a resource called the Anti-Violence Kit for all members in NSW, and can provide people who can speak and train staff in schools. The real problem is compliance: while schools are required to run anti-homophobia programs as part of their curriculum, there is no system in place to enforce this. Barnes estimates that 25 per cent of schools do it well, another 50 per cent pay lip service, and the rest ignore it completely.
Mike Keely, senior vice-president of the State School Teachers Union of WA (SSTUWA), says there needs to be a coordinated response to the violence problem. The union is in the rare position of having secured departmental funding to address the issue systemically, and has negotiated a three-point program for student behaviour management. It involves: reducing class sizes in selected disadvantaged schools; seeding a professional development program focused on pedagogy that adopts a responsible process of analysing problems in the classroom (bringing in Peter Smilanich of Toronto and drawing on the work of Michael Fullan and the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education); and funding individual schools to run professional development programs based around this.
The reception to the program has been very positive. "Teachers and administrators in schools were starved for stuff that was practical,” says Keely. “We're very proud of it and it has had a significant effect in schools."
Joy Barnett, occupational health and safety organiser SSTUWA is concerned with the fallout from violent incidents. "When teachers go off with stress leave it is very hard for them to get their confidence back, and to feel in control in front of a group of students," she says. "Everything is focused on getting the child back to school, even though the support services aren't in place to modify the student's behaviour."
This year the WA Department of Education and Training is funding 80 teachers to train in a program to develop expertise that they can take back to their school and district communities. With the program largely focused
on lower secondary, the next step for the SSTUWA is addressing the problems in upper primary. "The reality is, public schools have got to look after these kids, but we need real support, not just pats on the back," says Keely.
Sharon Aris is a freelance writer.
Dean*, a 42-year-old design technology teacher with more than 20 years' teaching experience, has not been back into a classroom since he was attacked by a year 8 student in June. He had been supervising some older students in their school machine room when he noticed that a group of year 8 children were using equipment without wearing safety goggles. He asked them to put goggles on, but one boy ignored his request. When Dean repeated the request and then stepped over to turn off the machine, the boy hit him with a thick wooden plank, smashing his arm into the machine, following with a hit to Dean's stomach—all while screaming abuse.
"I'm a big guy, six foot, fit and healthy—you don't think that would affect you,” Dean says. But after the attack, just walking back through the school gate for a meeting, he had felt “sick in the stomach".
In Dean's view, the system let him down. The pupil was known to have anger management problems and had shoved several teachers before. Worse, Dean said, was the feeling that he was the one who had been penalised: the pupil was suspended for 10 days. "It was going to be five, but I said he had to get the maximum. Now he's back and is a hero to his peers."
While Dean has received workers compensation—and had to see specialists for his injuries—his absence has also meant a pay cut. "Something like this affects you physically, psychologically and financially," he says. "I really do want to stay in education. I consider myself a good teacher with valuable experience, but at the end of the day, I just don't know if it is worth it."
Margi*, a recently retrained teacher in IT and design technology, quit her job after five terms of threats, abuse and harassment. The first woman at her school to teach in the workshop, she had been surrounded by a group of year 11 boys while on playground duty who made disgusting remarks about her (assumed) homosexuality. She also had her school computer hacked into by a student who deleted her work and loaded sexually explicit material on; was accused by a student of 'coming onto her' after she had disciplined her; and had endured harassment from another teacher who also refused to clean the workshop after his classes—and encouraged the same from his male students - because that was 'woman's work'.
Margi says she tried everything from discussing student behaviour problems in staff meetings, and swapping playground duty to a more public area to dressing differently. She says sexist, homophobic and racist attitudes were rife among students. "The Fijian and Sri Lankan teachers were also having a shocking time," she says. The school leadership and other teachers were unable or unwilling to challenge them.
The last straw was when she was told at a staff meeting to stop "playing the woman card". "As teachers, it's our job to teach social skills and self-discipline as well as academic skills," she says. "But how can you teach students to be accountable for their behaviour if teachers aren't?"
Brian's* voice still shakes as he recounts a recent school attack that led to a student being charged by police. A high school principal in a large regional centre, he was recently instructed to enrol a student who had been expelled from another school. The student, not yet 15, challenged a classroom teacher in an aggressive manner that led Brian to suspend and eventually expel him. A day later, advised that the boy was on his way over, Brian anticipated trouble and intercepted him as he entered the school grounds. His jumper was wrapped around his arm as if concealing a weapon. Confronted, the student punched and kicked Brian and the assistant principal and made threats against their families. In the 30 minutes they waited for the police to arrive, they had to physically restrain him.
"This is my first experience of physical violence in 30 years of teaching," says Brian. "It's taken a long time for us to recover from this." The school now employs a security guard, paid directly out of its budget.
Brian says the system failed both him and the student. The boy had been expelled from four previous schools and was known to the Department of Human Services. Of the difficult decision to proceed with the assault charge, he says: "We want to alert the system. The system has not been active in supporting this boy." In terms of himself, he says he needs comprehensive information about students that are placed or allocated to his school, a difficulty under privacy legislation. "We need added resourcing and a follow-up process that is effective. This is a straightforward government, academic high school. It was the wrong kid, wrong setting. Schools are vulnerable, but I don't want to give up the fact it's a community of young people here learning and growing."
*The names of all teachers have been changed.
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