BEND over, boy!

The shocking news that teachers are facing violence and abuse from pupils as young as seven does not surprise me. But is it lack of parental support, or a failure of schools to challenge difficult behaviour?

I’m grateful TDL’s state secondary school is a bit stricter than most, but I laugh at some of its pathetic punishments.

A half an hour’s detention after school? I email back and say: “Keep her for the week. That will teach her a lesson.”

Some of TDL’s teachers sound more like therapists these days, “Yes TDL – I can see you’re upset. Is there a way you could express your frustration without punching the girl next to you.”

But I’ve noticed the older teachers who demand good manners, silence in class and punish truancy, tend to be respected by the kids – and, conversely, more popular.

Mind you, I’m not sure the violence reported in yesterday’s paper is any worse than the lawless corridors of my 1980s North London comprehensive, but the difference is that teachers then were not scared of the kids.

I remember watching my headmaster put a 6ft teenage bully up against the wall and threaten to disembowel him – clearly trained in the Viking method of teaching.

But teachers knew then that they had the support of the system when they punished the culprits – and parents didn’t get any say at all in the matter.

Some of readers’ stories of corporal punishment in schools would make your hair stand on end. But what we need is a middle ground between brute violence and the naughty step.

Reader Colin Masters in Rugby says: “They abolished the good old days when backchat meant any teacher or police officer would give a kid a clip round the ear. And telling parents would result in another one.”

However Colin was just nine years old when he first felt the whip of his teacher’s cane.

“I got the bacon slicer for being sarcastic to Mr Tebbs,” says Colin, recalling the painful type of whipping on the behind that was administered from above rather than horizontally.

Colin was also made to wait outside the headmaster’s office.

“I don’t recall the crime, but he came out of the office and slapped my legs and sent me on my way. Another time I was caned just for being late.” Little girls didn’t escape harsh punishments either, as Maureen Arnold, of in Gillingham, Kent, reveals, recalling the cruelty of her teacher.

She writes: “I was 11 and had turned round to talk to my friend in class.

“The teacher told me to turn to the front, but I turned and smiled at my friend.

“All of a sudden there was a blow to my head – the teacher had hit me round the head with a history book. It really hurt but I didn’t cry.” Last week, Colin Farrell’s comments about being rapped on the knuckles reminded Pauline McHugh of the nuns using the sharp edge of the ruler at her primary school in Hammersmith, West London. “My ‘heinous crime’ was to eat with my knife and fork in the wrong hands,” she writes.

“I still eat this way and feel totally disoriented if I try the ‘correct way’. This would not be allowed in our more enlightened times.”

Do you think harsher punishments would help schools now? Email siobhan.mcnally@ mirror.co.uk