We are failing our principals
VIOLENCE is now blatant and commonplace in what should be hallowed halls of learning, and the targets are the purveyors of knowledge.
The eighth Australian Principals Occupational Health and Wellbeing Survey released this week reveals our school chiefs have hit a high in anxiety and a low in being treated with respect.
No one should have to go to work in fear that the purpose of their professional endeavours will turn on them. But also we need fine minds and steady heads to guide our next generation, and the threats and intimidation are making taking up leadership positions in teaching terribly unappealing.
It would be easy to suggest that we don’t have a problem at schools as much as an issue with our disrespectful young in general. That may be true and there is ample evidence to support it, but it is not just violent children who are causing the rancour at schools: the survey shows their parents are just as likely to rain acrimony and aggro down on the heads of those in charge.
Parents threaten, follow, intimidate and assault heads of school and their closest colleagues. Not just a handful: a large number. And that, surely, is something that can be immediately addressed. While children may be regarded as a work in progress, grown-ups have no excuse.
Queensland could take the approach of the NSW Government, which last year introduced a mandatory code of conduct for parents, or the ACT Education Minister’s tack, which is to deny the problem is worsening but was instead just being reported more. What no state can do is nothing. The problem has become overwhelming and it is part of a broader issue. The country is long overdue to have frank and grown-up conversations about the root causes of our violent behaviour.
Violence, threatened and actual, is inflicted on all frontline workers at unprecedented rates, to the point where it is often anticipated by the professionals and seen as an option by perpetrators. It is omnipresent: on public transport, in ambulances, in homes as well as in schools.
But while hospital emergency departments, taxis and buses have some security measures and police are trained to deal with the unruly, prin- cipals remain unprotected. Because the problem of violent kids and parents in schools has been unaddressed, the principals are left strategically unarmed – and that can and must change immediately.
Acknowledging the problem of violence in schools must be closely followed up with programs for self protection and greater support systems for school leaders.
The survey also revealed the torment for school bosses goes deeper than fear for safety with principals also reporting high levels of “moral stress”, defined as uncertainty about how they could fulfil their moral obligations.
Their obligation, their very reason for being, is to educate our children, to give our young intellectual wings and life choices. For most educators, that desire supersedes career choice and enters the calling realm.
Perhaps because of this, the survey also found principals were more satisfied with their job than the general population.
They might be stressed, threatened and hurt, but principals know they are doing important work.
That is worthy of great admiration.