Legislation which would protect and help teachers deal with the rising number of disruptive and dangerous pupils at primary level was called for at yesterday's INTO conference in Galway.
"The amount of teaching time now consumed in dealing with disruption in our classroom has grown out of proportion," said Mr John Carr, general treasurer of the INTO.
"We demand that the Minister for Education introduces legislation which will give school authorities, including teachers, statutory rights in relation to each school's approved disciplining procedures, including the right to insist, where necessary, on psychological assessment of pupils and access to appropriate services."
Delegates were told that in one school in south Co Dublin, which caters for children with special needs, more than half the staff had sustained injuries following attacks.
"There is a sizeable and growing number of schools where the range of sanctions to deal with unruly and undisciplined pupils is grossly inadequate," said Mr Tom O'Sullivan, a member of INTO's central executive committee.
"Teachers are becoming powerless, not to mention being at their wits' end, not only to make individual pupils perform educationally relevant tasks, but to prevent children from impeding the education of other pupils," he said.
He listed "restlessness, fidgeting, talkativeness, attention-seeking, petty thieving, teasing, name-calling, bad language, constant movement, indifference, minor damage to other pupils' or school property, defiance, apathy and boisterous behaviour" as being the cause of "inordinate levels of disturbance with consequential loss of teaching time".
Mr Noel Ward, a delegate from the union's Tallaght branch, called for an alternative for students who were expelled and a statutory system of expulsion at primary level. "There are children in primary schools today who are almost unmanageable," he said.
"Such students fill their days by defying authority, depriving peers of learning time and trying to enlist others in disruption . . . teachers can envy the facility which some second-level schools seem to have in handing out de facto expulsions." He said "students expelled have to be moved to another school or educational setting and not left at an impressionable age to a culture of indolence and of openness to every temptation from drugs to petty crime.
"The failure to track, counsel and offer services to such early dropouts is a blot on the education landscape," he said. "The last thing we should seek to do is add to the pool of early school leavers. Expulsion and early leaving are linked. The most disruptive pupils often suffer a lack of parental interest and an adverse home situation, have relationship problems and low expectations of themselves and of school. In class they are difficult, bored and live down to their own expectations and reputations. For them, expulsion is a fast track to leaving school early."
There was already a serious early school-leaving problem. It was an outrage that 1,000 students "disappear" each year at the end of primary school. There must be an alternative for excluded students at primary level, he said.
In one special school, a delegate described the fear and concerns of teaching staff both for themselves and for their students, following a range of incidents where eight of the 15 staff members were injured.
Mr Finbarr O'Driscoll, of South Co Dublin branch, listed some of the injuries suffered by staff members in this school, which caters for children with severe emotional and behavioural disorders: a teacher who was pushed against a wall and sustained bruising on the forehead; two teachers who were bitten by pupils; another teacher sustained two black eyes; another sustained a back injury; one teacher's hair was pulled by a pupil.
"What makes it worse," he said, "is that the Minister has visited the school and received several letters relating to these ongoing problems. Nothing has happened." These were injuries sustained by eight teachers from a staff of 15, he said. "Must we wait until something more serious happens?"
Primary teachers wanted statutory rights to enable them to exclude persistently disruptive pupils from classes. They also wanted a statutory duty given to the inspectorate, as agents of the Department of Education and Science, to place such pupils in an appropriate educational setting within 10 school days of exclusion.