A TEACHER was disciplined by jobsworth school bosses after refusing to teach a pupil who throttled her in front of her class, she claims.
Mum Laura Linklater was so traumatised by the incident in Bradford, West Yorkshire, she quit her job and now homeschools her own two kids.
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The 40-year-old said her teacher training did not “prepare me to handle” such a physical assault, which had left her “shaking”.
To make matters worse, she said the following week the pupil arrived in her class for morning registration without any prewarning from school bosses.
While teaching the Year 10 class, Laura said one pupil suddenly became aggressive.
She told The Sun: “He was really tall, really big and very angry.
“He came into my class one day barging tables and chairs, so I told him to tone it down.
“Suddenly, he had me up against the classroom wall by my throat.”
Laura described how a Sixth Form student “boffed” the pupil to get him off and another rang the alarm before he was taken away by a PCSO.
“I was left shaking,” she said.
She went on to say: “I was only told he’d been ‘dealt with’, before he turned up to my registration class next Monday, without a call or even an email from the school warning me.
“I refused to teach the student. I didn’t blame him; but I refused to have my aggressor in my classroom.”
In a subsequent meeting with a superior, she claims she was told “it’s your job” to teach the teenager, and so she threatened to quit.
“He (a superior staff member) found this shocking, and I got in trouble for refusing to teach my attacker.”
She added: “I was having to fight for my basic right to not have aggressors in my classroom.”
Laura said after the meeting: “I held my tears in long enough to find a classroom to cry in.”
After the meeting, a senior colleague found Laura crying and “fought my corner so I didn’t have to teach the student anymore”, she explained.
“But that was only because of the exceptional kindness of this individual.”
Months after the incident in late 2012 she left her job, describing the incident as “the last straw”.
Laura added: “My decision to home-school my kids was heavily influenced by my time as a teacher.
“You’d be stunned by the number of home educators who are teachers – who’ve seen the system from the inside out and don’t want their kids to go through it.”
I held my tears in long enough to find a classroom to cry in.
Laura Linklater
A survey last month by the NASUWT teachers’ union shows that Laura’s experience is shockingly common in the profession.
It showed that two fifths of school teachers have experienced physical abuse or violence by pupils in the last 12 months.
In detail, 20% of the survey’s 5,800 respondents said they had experienced being hit or punched by pupils in the last year, while 38% said they had been shoved or barged.
The results also suggested that such abuse is set to get worse, with a staggering 81% of teachers believing the number of pupils showing violent and abusive behaviours had increased.
Thankfully, Laura had received basic self defence training while doing a previous job at PREVENT, working with young offenders.
She fears without this previous training, she would not have been able to keep her attacker away until he was removed.
Laura explained: “My PGCE training did not prepare me to handle kids who towered over me.
“I was given one day of theory-based Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) lectures.
“You come out of it blinking in the sun, with no idea what you’re doing.”
My teen’s school referred me to the POLICE because of a few sick days – I’m fuming but people ask why I’m kicking off
A MUM has revealed she’s been referred to the police after her teenage daughter missed a few days of school due to being ill.
Mum Sara Louise took to TikTok to rant after being notified that the authorities would be coming to do a welfare check on her child, who is in Year 10.
The furious mum explained that her daughter has ”some additional needs” – which Sara felt like were ”not met by the school”.
In the video, Sara said that before the incident, her daughter had been off for three weeks on a different occasion ”because she was unwell” – and that time, there was allegedly no mention of a welfare check.
”I only had phone calls to check in and see if she was okay. Some of them I didn’t even answer,” Sara said in a recent clip on TikTok.
The outraged mum went on: ”This term, she’s been off for 11 days and they’ve rung me twice in the 11 days.
”And today, when I answered the phone call, she asked me if she could come out and do a welfare check – and I kindly declined.
”I said ‘No, I don’t want you to come to my house’,” Sara said, adding that her teenager was ”absolutely fine” and didn’t ”want any interaction with the school”.
Under the Education (Penalty Notices) Regulations, schools usually consider a welfare check when a child has missed 10 school sessions (equivalent to 5 days) of unauthorised absences within a rolling 10-week period.
Schools may conduct a welfare check sooner if they have concerns about a child’s wellbeing, even if the absence is shorter.
Before a home visit, schools will usually try to contact the parents first to understand the reason for the absence.
”I’m fuming. Because I have now declined, they’re telling me that they have a duty of care – which is fine – and safeguarding and all the rest of it, to come out and do this check.”
Sara, who is in the process of moving her daughter to another school, noted that getting the police involved felt as if she was ”hiding” and ”abusing” the child.
”I know they haven’t said that – but the way that comes across is, like, sinister.”
Despite the school notifying Sara, the mum said there was no chance she was going to the child’s school to let them know the daughter was fine ”when she’s fine”.
”And there’s not a cat in hell’s chance that they’re coming to my house to see that she’s fine.”
The furious mother, who insisted the school had never given ”a s**t” about her daughter, knew there’d be backlash after posting the clip – but said she didn’t ”give a crap”.
If the authorities do show up, Sara said she’d be having the conversation with the police from her camera.
”This is what you get for doing what’s right for your kid.”
Despite the incredibly high rate of pupil assaults, no mandatory training exists for teachers to deal with violent assault, sexual harassment or sexual assault from pupils.
Jennifer Moses, National Official For Equalities and Training at the NASUWT explained: “Schools are only obligated and trained to deal with pupil-on-pupil or staff-on-pupil violence and sexual harassment – mainly as a safeguarding issue through the Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) statutory guidance.
“Schools should have something in their anti-bullying policies or staff handbooks that addresses violence and harassment from pupils, but this is not nationally addressed.
“There may be schools that provide this specific training, but I would guess it is very limited, and I am not aware of any such schools.”
In a situation where teachers’ protection is largely left to individual schools, many educators do not feel they are amply supported by their employers.
The 2023 NASUWT Behaviour in Schools Report showed that just 55% of teachers reported behavioural incidents to their manager within their school or college.
Of those who did not report such behaviours, 36% felt their capability would be called into question as a result.
In March, another NASUWT survey showed that nearly half (49%) of female teachers had experienced physical abuse or violence from pupils in the previous 12 months, compared to 36% of male respondents.
More than double the number of female teachers said they had been hit or punched by pupils (36%) compared to their male counterparts (13%).
This kind of violence is often embedded in misogyny, and is not restricted to teenage students.
‘Amy’, a former primary school teacher in London who has chosen to remain anonymous, told of an encounter where she was attacked by a schoolboy with a pair of scissors.
She said: “I was teaching a year 3 class, and a 7-year-old boy was acting disruptively.
“This boy refused to take any authority from women, and frequently called me a ‘black b****’.
“He kept telling me: ‘I’m going to hit you, I’m going to hit you.’
“Then he pulled out a pair of scissors and attacked me with them.
“It was only because we had a teaching assistant present at that moment, the pair of us were able to restrain him.
“I’m only 5’2” and this boy was incredibly strong.
“Had the TA not been there, this boy could have run out of the school gates with these scissors.”
This boy refused to take any authority from women, and frequently called me a ‘black b****’.
‘Amy’
Training and support for this teacher were, again, worryingly absent in the aftermath of this attack.
“I had absolutely no training for these kinds of incidents,” Amy said.
“After the attack, the teaching assistant asked if I was OK, but there was no support offered to me beyond a timeout.
“The lack of help was so normalised that it’s only now that I realise I should have been better protected by the school.
“The only feedback I received was the mother of the child on the phone having a right go at me.
“There’s no way I would ever go back into teaching of any form because of my experiences – I don’t want to be in those environments.
“I don’t know how to keep myself safe.”
Pupils armed with weapons
The April NASUWT survey showed teachers reporting attacks from pupils with more than just classroom scissors – using weapons such as knives and fire extinguishers.
Again this is not limited to secondary schools, as Amy recalls a year 6 student bringing a knife to school while she was teaching.
Many teachers feel that while the behaviour of pupils is getting worse, the tools and deterrents they have available to them to maintain order in classrooms are becoming increasingly scarce.
“We can’t use language like ‘consequences‘, or anything with the negative connotations in the classrooms nowadays,” said another a former primary school teacher from Inverness – who we have named ‘Sandra’.
She added: “When I started teaching, you could take designated playtime away called ‘golden time’ as a consequence for not following the rules.
“Now there’s not a chance you could have that kind of system in place – you can’t have anything where you are seen to be punishing or shaming, because that could cause trauma.
“When there’s no sanctions, when everything has to be positive the whole time, there’s no way of managing the class.
“One of the things that schools did have for really bad behaviour situations or children that were repeated offenders, is that they could exclude them for a few days or a week.
“But now, schools are reluctant to exclude kids – because from the top down, they were instructed to reduce the total number of exclusions.”
Susan found the consequences of this toothless sanction system were increasingly frequent incidents of classroom violence.
She said: “I experienced a range of behaviours from verbal to physical abuse.
“This included being physically pushed, kicked or spat at.
“I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to evacuate the class to a safe space away from a child having a meltdown.”
“It didn’t matter what stage of school you taught at, you could still be assaulted.
“It was scary, even if they were little, because there’s so much anger there, and because you’re wary that as a grown up you don’t want to come across as if you’ve given too much force, because you could then be liable for assault.
“Students wouldn’t have to apologise for an attack on a teacher, especially if they have an additional support need.”
In 2024, 40.5% of all pupils in Scotland had an additional support need (ASN) – which has more than quadrupled since 2010, when 9.7% of students were deemed to have an ASN.
“As soon as a child has an additional support need, it’s like you can’t separate that need from behaviour,” Susan explained.
She added: “I believe we’ve got a proportion of children who are diagnosed with having an additional support need, when they have a behaviour issue.”
Susan also noticed a rise in misogynistic comments even amongst her primary-age pupils.
A study for the children’s commissioner for England in 2023 found that a quarter of 16-25 year olds in the UK had first seen pornography while in primary school, leading to a normalisation of derogatory behaviours towards women by young men in schools.
“There’s a lot more primary school children making inappropriate comments against teachers – it was comments about how I looked and what I was wearing.
“I definitely think, you know, part of that problem is because of the rise in social media and children having access to devices much younger.”
“There’s a dislike for females and it’s obviously derived a lot from Andrew Tate-type people online.”
Susan quit teaching just before the start of COVID to start a tutoring service, as she felt that as a regular teacher she was spending far more time managing behaviour than actually teaching any content.
“I love tutoring because I’m actually able to teach,” she told us.
“I felt a lot of the time in the classroom that I was fire fighting or implementing crowd control, as opposed to actually teaching.
“Teachers nowadays do much more pastoral care than actual teaching.
“We’re the front line for everything, but we’re also the first person that gets shot when something doesn’t go right.
“I hear from my ex-colleagues who are still teaching that post COVID, it’s got much, much worse.
“The demands on teachers have massively gone up, but the funding and support hasn’t – if anything, they’ve been dramatically cut.”
The Sun has approached Laura’s former school for comment.
Do you have a similar story? Email harry.torrance@thesun.co.uk
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