"It feels like parents have started expecting schools and teachers to be the solution to all their problems,” says UK headteacher Norman Wright. File photo / Getty Images
Headteacher Norman Wright is running late. He has just spent the last hour going through CCTV footage with a disgruntled parent after she complained she’d been attacked by a fellow parent over a row between their daughters.
“It took an hour to calm her down and look through the footage,” he sighs. “It turned out she started the fight.”
Wright* has seen it all. For the past eight years he’s been headteacher at a primary school near Birmingham in the UK, but he’s approaching three decades in teaching overall. “Nothing surprises me any more,” he says. “But, as a teacher, I never thought I’d find myself spending a Friday night putting together a policy for ‘Managing Serial Complainants’.”
In the last academic year, the UK’s Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) received 14,900 complaints about schools, an increase of nearly 25 per cent on the previous year. For classroom teachers, this is the thin end of the wedge.
“It feels like parents have started expecting schools and teachers to be the solution to all their problems,” says Wright. “A growing number are determined to believe they or their children are being persecuted, that teachers aren’t doing their best for pupils.”
The communication breakdown between teachers and parents was exemplified this August by the case of “outstanding” and “adored” deputy headteacher Sarah Mead. Despite an “unblemished” teaching career, Mead was forced out of her post at a north London primary school after a schoolboy sustained a “superficial” burn from a glue gun in her classroom.
The boy’s mother went to The Sun newspaper alleging her son was in “serious pain”, describing herself as “livid”, and reported the incident to the police. The parent, unaware that Mead had resigned almost immediately following the outcry, began a petition to get her sacked and began a civil claim about the injury.
While Mead was found guilty by the Teaching Regulation Agency of “unacceptable professional behaviour and conduct that might bring the profession into disrepute” (for forgetting to follow the school’s procedures, such as contacting the mother, informing the headteacher or recording it in the accident book), the agency’s panel said this was an “isolated incident” and that, at the time, Mead was “attempting to undertake a number of highly pressurised roles and was also dealing with significant safeguarding concerns”.
These factors, the ruling added, had a “material impact on the misconduct and, whilst they did not excuse her actions, they significantly reduced her personal level of culpability in this case”.
“I know of a case where a headteacher was abused, stalked really, by a parent in a variety of different ways over a nine-month period; the police had to get involved and it went to court,” says Wright. “It’s far from unheard of to get threatening behaviour. I’m pleased to say it has only happened to me once in the past three years though, thankfully.”
Part of the issue is that parents are more sensitive than ever to their children’s emotions and get over-involved in schoolyard drama.
“I think parents project their own anxieties and stress onto their children,” says Ben Cooper*, a secondary-school maths teacher in north London. “They often apply adult motives to a child’s world. I think some of the stress from things like Covid and the cost-of-living crisis is a factor.”
Some parents mollycoddle and refuse to accept that their own children might be at fault. “Last spring we had a parent accuse a member of staff of bullying their child,” says Cooper. “This boy would go home every night and complain to his mum about this teacher.
“After a very stressful investigation, we found that the staff member had followed policies to the letter. The child admitted he had lied and exaggerated the complaints.”
Teachers often find themselves being dragged into incidents that aren’t even happening in school hours.
“Just last week I had a parent send me reams of printed-out WhatsApp conversation between her child and another child in my form group,” says Cooper. “It was a basic disagreement about one of them copying the other’s outfits and the parent chalked it up to bullying. That happens quite often. Parents are very quick to leap to the assumption their child is being bullied.”
What surprised Cooper was what the parent expected him to do about it. It was suggested that he begin proceedings to get the “bully” expelled, “or at least suspended”.
“Some parents go from 0 to 100 instantly,” says Wright. “A playground falling-out leads to demands of exclusion when, in the past, parents would have been happy for us to separate the kids and keep an eye on the situation. I’d say 99.9 per cent of complaints are misunderstandings.”
The situation is proving untenable for some. Another teacher, who asked not to be quoted directly, told The Telegraph that she decided to resign after a child alleged she’d maliciously thrown a balled-up piece of paper at them. When the child’s mother demanded an investigation (which ultimately proved the teacher’s innocence) the stress and lack of support from school leaders led to the teacher resigning from a 15-year career.
This is the kind of incident that the teaching profession can ill afford. A UK Department for Education workforce survey, published in July, showed almost 40,000 teachers resigned last year. That’s 9 per cent of the total workforce, and the highest number on record.
And this torrent of resignations comes at the same time as a recruitment crisis. Vacancies in secondary schools are up 40 per cent. Nearly half of secondary schools and 30 per cent of primary schools reported that they had failed to fill positions due to a “weak or empty” field of applicants, according to a 2023 report by the education survey app Teacher Tapp.
“I probably would not have become a teacher if I’d been warned about modern parents,” admits Cooper. “The stress-to-pay ratio is increasingly not worth it, in my opinion.”
Those entering the profession are so alarmed by what they see that newly qualified teachers (NQTs) are the group most likely to leave teaching within five years.
For Wright, chaos in the education system at large is making life harder for teachers on the frontlines. “The slating we keep getting from the Government doesn’t help the situation,” he says.
“If people keep saying that teachers are lazy or money-grabbing, that is how parents will perceive us. I think the phrase used recently by the Education Secretary [Gillian Keegan] was ‘sitting on our arses’.
“No teacher is demanding to be celebrated, but I wish people would appreciate that we do work hard. We do this job not for money or notoriety but because we like working with children and we want to see them have a bright future.”
In the private sector, too, pushy parents are a well-worn topic of staffroom debate. Harriet Gregory*, a teacher of seven years at an independent primary school in Surrey, has experienced her fair share.
“In the private sector, parents can be quite neurotic,” she explains. “Where is their child relative to the rest of the class? Why am I not pushing their child enough or giving them enough support?
“I am forever being told by parents that their child is actually very bright but not able to show that at school. Ultimately, they’re paying customers and expect a high level of service. Competition is massive ... and naturally they want the best.”
“The problem comes when parents expect teachers to be babysitters, tutors and counsellors,” she adds. “There simply isn’t time in the school day for all that.”
And time is key: while it’s impossible to compare levels of discipline in schools to, say, 10 years ago, a national behaviour survey report from the Department for Education, published in June this year, said that, on average, about six minutes for every half an hour in class was eaten up by poor behaviour. Over the course of a normal school day, this represents 50 minutes lost.
None of this is to say that parents are always in the wrong. Patricia Wood* tells The Telegraph that she is “the last person to ever become a pushy parent”, but felt she was forced to become one by her secondary school-aged daughter’s science teacher last year.
“This woman was a newly qualified teacher, basically a graduate, and simply shouldn’t have been in the profession,” Wood explains. “When mock exam time was approaching, my daughter was constantly coming home in a panic because she felt unprepared.”
When Wood started taking a closer look at her daughter’s exercise books, she spotted spelling errors in the teacher’s marks and factual inaccuracies marked as correct. “When I raised the issue, the teacher’s excuse was that she had dyslexia,” she says.
After tussling with senior leadership and the teacher in question, Wood managed to get her daughter moved to a different class, but says her experiences have “shaken her faith in the type of people who are qualifying now”.
So what can be done? The word Wright comes back to is “trust”. “All I want is for my parents to trust me that I know what I’m doing,” he says. “When they have an issue, I want them to come to me with it, trust me to investigate it and give me the chance to deal with it properly. I want them to trust that I am doing my best for every child that comes to my school.”
Communication and visibility have paid dividends at Wright’s school. “Myself and my deputy are on the playground every morning before school and every afternoon, talking to parents, having a laugh and a joke,” he says. “Since we made the decision to start doing that, complaints don’t escalate nearly as much. Well, most of the time anyway.”
* Names have been changed
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