Third of nursery staff ‘feel unsafe’

ALMOST a third (3 .6 per cent) of nursery nurses and pupil support assistants in Edinburgh do not feel safe at work, a union survey has found.

The research by Unison and the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) found more than half of nursery nurses and pupil support assistants (50.6 per cent) said they witnessed violence daily or several times per day, while 48.7 per cent had directly experienced violence at least once a week.

The unions have presented councillors and senior officials in Edinburgh with an 11-point plan to tackle the issue of violence in the city’s schools and nurseries.

The survey of 1,378 staff found seven out of ten nursery nurses and pupil support assistants and more than half of teaching staff feel suffering violence is seen as ‘part of the job’ by employers.

Unison’s Graham Neal said: ‘There is a real crisis here that the council must face up to. Our members are committed to the children they work with but we need greater clarity about what happens when schools cannot meet the needs of a child.

‘We are calling for a review of the criteria for placing children in special schools and schools need to be properly staffed to deal with actual intake.

‘Most of all we need the council to recognise the problem and be clear that violence is not “part of the job”.’

Almost 90 per cent of teaching staff said they had not had relevant training on dealing with violent behaviour. Alison Murphy, of EIS, said: ‘At the same time as we started moving children with complex medical, social, emotional or learning needs into mainstream classes, we embarked on a decade of cuts in resourcing and staffing that makes it impossible to meet these children’s needs.’