How the SNP has left Scottish teachers at the mercy of violent pupils. Teacher tells of his horrific year of physical attacks and abuse at Scots secondary school

Landing on his backside in the school corridor, the music teacher took a moment to assess the situation. 

He had just been ejected from his own classroom.

A 12-year-old boy had done it. The pupil had taken exception to being told to queue with the rest of the class to sanitise his hands – as school rules dictated at the time – and tried to barge past the adult in the room.

When that didn’t work he took a few steps back then took a running leap, barrelling into him with such force the teacher was propelled through the door and off his feet.

Some weeks after that, the teacher’s car was keyed in the school car park. 

On another day, a group of pupils vandalised his classroom for a laugh. 

They poured gallons of soup from a home economics class over musical instruments, damaging some irreparably.

He was spat on several times. Once, he was left to contend with an out of control S2 boy throwing instruments and chairs around the room and flipping tables. 

The youngster then climbed on top of a desk and jumped from it onto the teacher as he launched a furious assault.

The pupil was removed from the class but remained in school. Two weeks after this incident, the boy attacked a first-year girl, breaking her jaw.

By that time music master Keith (not his real name) had decided his debut year teaching in a Dundee secondary school would also be his final one.

The profession was not for him, at least not in an educational environment in thrall to the notion that ‘restorative conversations’ – an SNP policy – are the key to addressing thuggery.

After gaining a teaching degree in Scotland, serving his probationary year in a Perthshire school and then landing a permanent post in Dundee, the Irishman quit for the sake of his mental and physical wellbeing.

‘My year in Dundee was enough to burn me,’ Keith tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘It burnt out the spark.’ He left teaching and took a job at a local Halfords installing dash-cams in cars.

Now living back in Ireland, he reflects: ‘A lot of the issues that I was having with the kids were simply because I was making them put away their phones.

‘I was making them sit down and take their jackets off… I was literally following the school rules and there was a lot of push-back.’

The dismal experience which prompted him to abandon his teaching career in June 2021 is far from an aberration in Scottish teaching. Indeed, some describe it as ‘situation normal’.

According to whistleblowers, the explosion of violence in both primary and secondary schools in recent years is pushing some probationer teachers to quit almost as soon as they see the chaos they face every day in classrooms.

Longer-serving teachers are in despair over the indiscipline and threats to them and their pupils’ safety.

Many say senior leadership teams at their schools are determined to play down every incident – and even to regard the violence as stemming from a failing on the teachers’ part.

Figures revealed in The Scottish Mail on Sunday last week showed the number of assaults on teachers rose to 16,000 in ­Scotland during the 2023/2024 academic year. 

That is one every four minutes of class time – and almost treble the number recorded three years ago.

Set against these figures, it becomes clear Keith’s story is indicative of a systemic disciplinary failure across Scottish education.

Much of it, he says, he has tried to block from his memory. He suffered a year of sleeplessness and the stress of his job brought on weight gain.

‘F*** teaching,’ he declares now. ‘Either you’re an absolute martyr or you clock in and clock out. That’s no life for me.’

Keith was thrilled to land the teaching job in Dundee when it became clear there was no permanent post available in the Perthshire secondary where he did his probationary year.

Many probationers struggle to land staff jobs and often join lists of supply teachers and support themselves by other means when they are not needed.

But the move from a rural secondary to an inner city one opened his eyes to the realities thousands of his colleagues were facing.

‘In Perthshire I was at a rural school and a lot of them were farmers’ kids. They grew up with that mindset of the cows need to be fed, the crops need to come in and you just get on with the job, you know? There was very little of that attitude in the city school.’

He adds: ‘We had no faith that serious problems could be addressed at all.’

The incident where he was bundled out of his own classroom by the 12-year-old was a case in point. 

Following procedure, Keith alerted his head of ­department to what had ­happened, and a restorative ­conversation was arranged with the boy, with a school resource officer sitting in.

‘It was worth absolutely zero. I detailed that I didn’t expect to have to worry about being assaulted in class, that I wanted to be able to come and do my work and I wanted my students to be able to come and be safe in their class, and he was suitably apologetic.

‘The resource officer escorted him back to his class and said, “That was a really good conversation. You had a really constructive meeting with him”. Then he was back in my class later in the week and that was it, there was no punishment.

‘It’s not that I am against restorative conversations as a thing, but I have just never seen them work – and that definitely didn’t work because he continued to cause havoc in my class.

‘Not to the same extent, but I did have to call the resource officer probably on three or four occasions and have him removed from the room because he was jumping on the tables and just causing mayhem in the class.’

The former teacher, who is in his 40s, had himself attended an inner city school in the Republic of Ireland in the 1990s.

He recalled: ‘None of this would have been acceptable there, absolutely none. We had ­antisocial behaviour, yeah, sure, but it got dealt with.

‘If you did something like this you were taken out of class and you were gone for a month or six weeks until you were able to control yourself.’

He adds: ‘I want a room where there is order and there is a bit of discipline and I do think that was causing me hassle.’

It is possible, then, that the vandalism attack on his classroom was some kind of twisted revenge. He recalls returning to the room during the lunch break and seeing a group of five or six pupils at the windows.

When they spotted him, they fled, but he was able to identify two of them.

When he approached the window he found vats of soup had been poured through it onto the musical keyboards and other instruments inside the room.

‘I had to clean them off as best I could, but the soup had gone down into the mechanism and gummed things up.

‘I identified a couple of them to my head and that was passed up the chain and, as far as I could tell, nothing was done.’

By the time his car was keyed in the car park, leaving the driver’s side scored with zig-zags and circles, he had lost all faith in the school authorities’ ability or willingness to take action.

‘I didn’t report it officially,’ he says. ‘The car was parked in an area not covered by cameras so, at that point, I had kind of given up. I had resigned myself to quitting the job.’

The incident in which the S2 pupil ran amok in his classroom certainly was reported.

‘He came in late and something had set him off already.

‘He started kicking off and throwing ­instruments around. I eventually got him out after he had jumped onto the tables and then jumped into me.’

Although the boy was banned from the class, he returned to it twice at the start of a lesson, deliberately causing disruption before sauntering away.

‘There was hassle with him all year long,’ says Keith.

‘Two weeks later, he assaulted an S1 girl and broke her jaw. At the end of the school year, he was still there.’

The tragedy for Keith is not just a personal one. Indeed, in a sense, he is thankful he discovered early that an inner city teaching career would not work out.

What tears at him is the pupils who cannot opt out of the classroom environment as he did.

‘Even the first-year kids were old enough and wise enough to ­understand what was going on and the limits of my powers in dealing with stuff like this. You could see them all rolling their eyes when someone was kicking off again, knowing there was not a whole lot the teacher could do about it, so their education was 100 per cent suffering.’

Back in Ireland with his partner, who had moved to Scotland to be with him during his teaching career, Keith is now doing a degree in arts management.

He says: ‘I haven’t written teaching off entirely. I just said at the time I’m done for now and if I go back to it, it will definitely be with both eyes wide open and testing the waters very carefully before I subject myself to that again.’

A national survey last year by the nation’s largest teaching union, the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), found that 80 per cent of teachers had considered leaving the profession because of the rising tide of violence.

A second survey, carried out among only Aberdeen teachers, detailed their frustrations as they battled to control classes with too few resources and too little in their disciplinary armoury to deal with daily bouts of aggression.

One teacher said: ‘Today I came home saying I had a good day. But when I described my day, it included having classroom objects thrown at me and being horrifically sworn at.

‘That is not normal, but it has become normalised. I was just relieved children were not hurt.’

Others complained of the ‘gaslighting’ of hard-working colleagues by senior staff who don’t want to admit their school had a problem with violence.

One said: ‘We as staff are asked to consider if the child has needs or if they were feeling strong emotions ­during the violent incident and what we should have been doing to prevent the violence and support the child.’

Another reported: ‘Extreme ­violent behaviours are tolerated, and the same pupil is often back in class the following day.

‘Restorative practices are ­absolutely insufficient.’

And another said: ‘I was told that boys will be boys when I reported an object being thrown at me. Nothing was done.’ 

When Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth was asked about this report earlier in the year, she said she had not read it and that it would be for ‘Aberdeen City Council to respond to’.

Pressure is now growing on Ms Gilruth – herself a former teacher – to respond to what has become a national crisis.

Last week Tom Bennett, the UK Government’s top adviser on ­classroom behaviour, told The Scottish Mail on Sunday that the Scottish Government’s policy on school discipline was a ‘ghastly dereliction of public duty’.

Mr Bennett, from Glasgow, said: ‘The system is broken because schools are told to never exclude children, even for persistent abusive behaviour, and are expected to miraculously turn behaviour around by “pastoral” methods.’

He added: ‘This is utterly foolish and has never been demonstrated to work in any country in the world. These rules are written by people who have never ­successfully run a challenging classroom.’

Responding to Keith’s tale, EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley said: ‘Sadly, the experience of the ex-teacher that you have been working with is not entirely isolated.

‘It’s among some of the most extreme examples that we have, but worryingly the incidences of extreme behaviour like that has been increasing. That’s what our members are reporting.’

She said schools lacked the resources even to ensure the restorative practice policy was properly administered.

Liam Kerr, Scottish Conservative education spokesman, said: ‘This example is an utterly depressing reflection on the state of affairs in Scotland’s schools.

‘Evidence shows it’s also by no means unique. Teachers, pupils and parents are suffering due to the SNP’s abject failure in sorting this out.’

For Keith, there are no regrets. He has moved on, relocated and set himself new goals. For ­thousands still in the profession, fearing each day in the classroom, the better place he is in must surely seem alluring.

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