Meanwhile, an anonymous deputy principal has drawn overwhelming praise from teachers after sharing their no-nonsense response to a host of unreasonable pushback lines they frequently cop from parents.
Posting on the Australian teachers Reddit page, the leader outlined their comeback to comments such as ‘suspension is a reward to the student’, ‘she prefers Mr O because he’s fun’, and ‘where was the teacher in all of this?’, noting they were “100% done with parents this term”.
“I cannot tell you how many times I’ve told parents that’s it’s their responsibility to ensure a child’s suspension is not pleasurable,” they lament.
“No, I don’t do in-school suspensions – I’m not a babysitter. Your child isn’t welcome if he or she is going to behave like an absolute animal.
“Also, if you’re not willing to come to a return from suspensions meeting – I’m not returning your child. Simple. Don’t like it – appeal it – but you won’t because that requires effort and paperwork.”
Teachers have backed the ‘liberating’ approach, with one commenting:
“Props to you, OP. I dealt with that for 6 months, burnt out, and went back to the classroom. Your fair but firm approach is great for accountability on both sides. Keep it up, your staff surely appreciate it.”
Another responds with, “I wish the leaders I worked under had half your attitude. I might still be in teaching.”
But as former school principal Dr Paul Kidson warns, the popular post raises a “hot, burning issue” facing many Australian school leaders – namely, a seemingly growing number of hostile parents who are intent on seeking out ‘justice’ for their poorly behaved and/or disengaged child.
“The idea that you are in partnership with some families just ends up being such a constrained sense of reality,” the school leadership expert and researcher at ACU tells EducationHQ.
“… we talk about the 10-90 per cent rule: 10 per cent of people give you 90 per cent of the problems.
“And it’s unfortunate that the impact of so many of these come from a very small number [who are] often vociferous, and reluctant to agree that their child has any responsibility in any particular circumstance.”
Former school principal Dr Paul Kidson now works and engages with hundreds of school leaders and says the Reddit post very much reflects a growing concern on the ground.
Kidson says he’s heard some shocking stories from some principals on this front.
“Who, literally until [the principal has] said, “I can produce CCTV video footage of your child’s behaviour”, will some parents back down.
“And that speaks to an unwillingness for some families to be in partnership with the school – that is the most fundamental building block of a positive learning community.”
The latest Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, released in March, offered a worrying insight into the state of school leaders’ working conditions and mental health.
Compiled by ACU’s Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, the report argues that it remains unacceptable that too many school leaders are subject to behaviours – including from parents – that are rightly not tolerated in any other professional workplace.
Kidson, a lead researcher for the national study, says despite all schools having very clear codes of conduct for student behaviour and ‘unambiguous’ consequences when these are breached, a small cohort of parents simply take the view that the rules don’t apply to them.
These parents can often try to twist the focus onto the behaviour of other students when incidents arise, he flags.
“Unfortunately, a number of families will just say, ‘well, the way that those rules apply are not applicable in this case to my child, for my circumstance’.
“I could give you any number of personal anecdotes from when I’ve been dealing with parents and they have said, ‘you tell me what is happening to the other child’.
“And I’ve said, ‘well, I won’t do that because there’s a dignity and there’s a confidentiality about that, in the same way that I won’t tell the other family about the conversation that you and I are having now’.”
School leaders are now more than ever intent on supporting their teachers in situations where parents criticise and/or blame the school for their child’s poor behaviour, the expert suggests.
“Particularly since COVID, where there’s been a stress on teacher shortages. Some teachers, and particularly if they are [on a] casual contract, they’ll just go, ‘I don’t need this’, and they’ll walk away.”
Clearly this is not the best reason for why leaders should stand up for their staff, Kidson clarifies, but still there are teachers out there who feel unsupported in student behaviour incidents.
“Anecdotally, I could tell you that there will be some teachers who feel, ‘wow, far out, I’ve just been hung out to dry’.”
Kidson works and engages with hundreds of school leaders and says the Reddit post very much reflects a growing concern on the ground.
The expert believes that what is fundamentally an anti-social parental attitude appears to be escalating across society.
“It’s some families saying, ‘the world needs to run in a way that makes my child feel good, feel special, and anything that contravenes or undermines or constricts that or constrains it, then the school needs to do something about’.”
No principal gets out of bed in the morning and wants to remove a student from their school or hand out sanctions for poor behaviour, Kidson reminds us.
“It’s antithetical to what we are trying to do as a community, which is to help young people…
“But if you actually have that aggressive, uncooperative behaviour (from students and parents), then principals are left with little alternatives – and that’s a really regressive outcome.”
Let’s remember, Kidson says, that while we’ve had much ‘right and proper’ work around the rights of the child, “in good and healthy functioning societies, you don’t just have rights, you also have responsibilities”.
“And sometimes that’s lost for some families, (their view is) that things need to go in a way that is going to be amenable to their vision of the world, and then other people have to drop in around that.”
