Disruption linked to disadvantage

Survey findings: Teachers in disadvantaged schools are facing much more serious discipline problems than colleagues in other schools, according to the latest findings from a TUI survey on discipline.

Almost 46 per cent of teachers in disadvantaged schools said they encountered verbal abuse in the previous week, compared with 26 per cent of teachers in other schools.

Nearly 26 per cent of teachers in disadvantaged schools encountered threatening or intimidating behaviour compared with 16 per cent of teachers in other schools. Nearly one in 10 teachers in disadvantaged schools were sexually harassed or had sexual innuendo directed at them compared with 7.6 per cent in other schools.

In any given 40-minute class, 54 per cent of all teachers surveyed spent six to 14 minutes dealing with a single disruptive incident. A third said they had a "major difficulty" in controlling disruption while 26 per cent of teachers said the disruptive student posed a "serious" or "very serious" danger to the health and safety of their peers.

While 61 per cent of teachers said a minority of students were disruptive, almost one in 10 teachers said most students were disruptive. But students were not the only ones threatening violence, according to the survey.

Some 8.3 per cent of teachers from disadvantaged schools said they had experienced verbal abuse from parents while the corresponding figure from other schools was 5.6 per cent.

Some 40 per cent of teachers said their teaching was disrupted "to a major extent" by bad behaviour while a further 10 per cent said the behaviour was "completely disruptive".

The findings were released yesterday in the second part of a TUI discipline survey conducted in February. More than 1,100 teachers from 58 schools answered questionnaires on the issue.

Declan Glynn, TUI assistant general secretary said all 200 schools in the new disadvantaged schools scheme must be given behaviour support classrooms, instead of just 30 as outlined by Ms Hanafin for the first year of the project.

He pointed out that £55 million (€79.6 million) had been invested in the first year of a discipline project in Scotland, compared with the €2 million Ms Hanafin had allocated to her project. "We wish the Minister great success because at the current rate of investment it would take 39.3 years to catch up with the investment made in Scotland," he said.

Mr Glynn said it was unhelpful of Minister for Education Mary Hanafin to debate whether discipline was a crisis or a near crisis. "We say the Minister should reverse out of this cul-de-sac."

The TUI survey provided "dispassionate, objective data" and the problem must now be vigorously addressed. The Minister's discipline initiative was new and meaningful, he said, but she had taken "baby steps where giant steps were required".