Teachers must be free to report school violence

Education leaders will be ill equipped to deal with the problem if they don’t know its scale

Teachers’ claims that they are being “actively discouraged” from reporting violence in schools suggests education leaders are in the dark over the true scale of the problem.

Staff at Northfield Academy in Aberdeen, for example, have voted to strike over the level of violence and inspectors have found many pupils feel unsafe.

And yet fewer than five incidents were reported in 2023, 2021 and 2019, with no data available for 2020 and 2022.

Many schools say they have no violence incidents at all or report only very low numbers, including the majority of secondary schools in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, the Highlands, Stirling and South Lanarkshire.

Union leaders say the figures “do not tally” with what teaching staff are telling them.

Mike Corbett, NASUWT national official for Scotland, said: “I have literally visited schools in Scotland within the last month where staff members shared the fact that, in some cases, they are being actively discouraged by school management from reporting violent or abusive incidents, while some teachers admitted they had stopped reporting such incidents because ‘there are no consequences for these pupils’.”

That violent incident are on the rise in Scotland’s schools is not in doubt.

But if teachers are discouraged from reporting such incidents, education leaders will be ill equipped to combat the problem.

Obviously it is teachers who must bear the brunt of classroom violence. They need to be fully supported and encouraged to speak up about incidents so that these can be officially recorded.

To discourage teachers from recording violence would be to fail not only them but also pupils whose education is being disrupted by the behaviour of other children.

Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth said in February that violence in schools was a “really tricky challenge”.

Ensuring teachers are encouraged to report all incidents would help education leaders address the problem.