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, 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, 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.
