Bid to check violence in British schools

Press, Issue 33842, 14 May 1975, Page 17

Bid to check violence in British schools

<N Z.P .4 Staff Correspondent •

LONDON. Mav 13.

The British Government has intervened to try to counteract the growing problem of violence and truancy in the country’s schools: in a unique experiment, every teacher in Britain will be asked to offer a solution to the problem.

A special document has been approved, and in a fort-1 night it will be distributed! to local councils, head-' masters, and teachers’ | unions.

In the form of a questionnaire, it will ask schools to describe all incidents and to give detailed advice of what it is thought should be done to curb classroom violence and, eventually, to stamp it out altogether.

“There is no obvious answer to the problem of disruptive children,” the Junior Minister of Education (Mr Ernest Armstrong) said yesterday. “That is why we want to hear from the people in the front line—the classroom teachers.” In the document, Government education leaders—who have often been accused of covering-up the problem—admit for the first time that classroom thuggery is on the increase.

A survey has shown that in the 10 weeks after last Christmas .there were more

than 6000 attacks on teachers and pupils in a sample of I nearly 2000 schools.