School leaders have been confronted outside their homes, spat at and “offered out” for fights as abuse from parents surges, a Schools Week investigation can reveal.
One school has even installed cameras outside the homes of worried staff, while a traumatised primary head admits they are too scared to leave work alone late at night.
The head of another – who has been the focus of toxic social media campaigns – thinks online abuse led to one pupil wrongly branding him a paedophile.
Abuse cases ‘almost beyond belief’
Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT), says some of the cases are “almost beyond belief”.
A poll this week found 82 per cent of 1,600 NAHT leaders surveyed said they had been abused by parents in the past 12 months.
Verbal attacks were the most common, followed by posts online. Two-thirds of heads said they had experienced threatening behaviour and nearly a quarter were subject to discriminatory language, including racist, sexist or homophobic terms.
Schools Week has spoken to leaders across the country to chronicle the severity of the abuse. Many want to remain anonymous.
‘People offer me out on a weekly basis’
The new head of a Yorkshire secondary says he has “people come in and offer me out on a weekly basis” Another parent called him a “smug c***”.
A West Yorkshire primary school leader thinks expectations have grown “massively”, with parents believing staff “should be on call 24/7”.
On one occasion a parent emailed the school office at 8pm and marched in first thing the next morning “wanting to know what we were going to do with their concern”.
“I’ve had parents saying they will get me sacked, I can’t do my job, I’m not fit to run a school and they might report me to social services about my own children.
“If I’m working on my own late at night trying to catch up with everything, I’m conscious about getting into my car if certain parents are there to verbally or physically abuse me.”
Head ‘could not cope’
Kevin Flanagan, the head of Pensby High School in Wirral, won £10,000 in damages after he took legal action against two parents.
Court documents state that during a meeting in March 2022, one of the parents, Keith Critchley, “became angry, aggressive and highly abusive towards” Flanagan and an assistant head.
At one point, Critchley appeared “to be on the brink of physically attacking” Flanagan. Critchley denies this.
Papers also note that Stephanie Critchley “set up a Facebook group entitled ‘FamiliesFightFlanagan’, which she used to encourage others to “complain to Ofsted about Pensby High”.
The Critchleys claimed they were “exercising their Article 10 ECHR right to communicate with others… and to publicly campaign on an issue which the defendants felt strongly about”.
But Flanagan says: “Undoubtedly, if you look back to the beginning [of my teaching career in 1996] to now, you couldn’t measure the increase [in abuse] – it’s so huge.
“One headteacher I know really well, he just could not cope anymore with being told he was shit.”
Debra Walker, the NAHT’s northeast branch secretary, says leaders tell her they have been “spat at”, accused of “lying” and told they’re “not fit to do the job”.
Threats of violence
The leader of a coastal secondary has had parents “threaten to come into school and issue violence”.
He believes a social media campaign also filtered through to pupils, with one recently telling him: “You’re a fat paedophile and you’re getting sacked.”
Headteacher support service Headrest’s latest wellbeing report showed an “increasing number” of reports from leaders about “unreasonable parental behaviours”.
“In some, but not all, instances this has involved either the misuse of social media and/or the use of vexatious complaints – often aligned with a threat to notify Ofsted.”
Fifty-six per cent of leaders and 40 per cent of teachers responding to the charity’s annual survey noted an increase in vexatious complaints from parents and guardians.
Thirty-three per cent reported that parents were more verbally abusive, while 6 per cent said they had become more physically abusive.
Patrick Ottley-O’Connor, a former head who now leads National Professional Qualification for Headship sessions, says aspiring leaders are now “worrying” about having to deal with such abuse.
Fight threats ‘every week’
Most shockingly, the NAHT survey found one in 10 leaders had been the victim of an assault.
The Flanagan court papers claim the Critchleys even “presented themselves without prior invitation or arrangement” outside the home of one of the school’s co-chairs of governors.
The parents insisted they “went to deliver a letter” and “did not harangue him”. Flanagan also spotted Keith Critchley “parked on the street outside his home” one evening in June 2023.
The Critchleys said the defendant “genuinely wanted to speak to the claimant”. He “did not get out of his car or behave in a threatening or abusive manner”.
But Flanagan told Schools Week that Pensby “put cameras on staff houses because people felt threatened with the nature of the communications” during the dispute.
The anonymous Yorkshire secondary leader said he had received fewer fight threats since the school started to improve. But he warned those “in the turnaround phase” or that don’t secure community buy-in “get a lot more abuse”.
“The reality of teaching in challenging areas is abuse. It’s par for the course.”
Vexatious complaints
The NAHT is urging ministers to review “complaints procedures to deter vexatious use of the existing system by parents” – which can involve referrals to the misconduct agency and Ofsted before school processes have been followed.
The West Yorkshire primary leader says she “nearly walked out of school” last week, after receiving a call from the local authority saying two complaints had been sent to Ofsted.
Flanagan estimates that he receives correspondence from people “telling you they’re going to refer you to the Teaching Regulation Agency” (TRA) about once a month.
The number of TRA misconduct referrals leapt by more than 60 per cent to almost 1,700 in 2023-24. This was “largely driven” by an increase in the number coming from members of the public, the agency said.
Figures obtained through Freedom of Information show they accounted for 54 per cent (1,775) of the 3,300 misconduct reports lodged in the last two years.
Stress and unhappiness
Mark Tilling, the head of High Tunstall College of Science in Hartlepool, says the “velocity of arguments and complaints from parents… are getting bigger and bigger”.
He brings in local authority officers and a mediator – one of his school’s counsellors who is trained in this area –in the more extreme cases.
Meanwhile, the boss of a west London school flagged “the volume of subject access requests and the flooding of paperwork” over the past 12 months, demanding “every email [or] every time my daughter’s name been mentioned”.
He receives two of these a week – which can take more than 50 hours to resolve and “drowning” staff with additional tasks.
Figures also suggest that leaders are finding the job harder.
The latest wave of the DfE’s working lives of teachers and leaders survey revealed 46 per cent of heads reported high levels of anxiety in 2023. This compares with 40 per cent in 2022.
A Teacher Tapp survey of more than 600 heads in October last year showed 27 per cent were either “moderately dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with work. The figure stood at 21 per cent in 2021.
When asked their biggest source of “work-related stress or unhappiness”, 16 per cent pointed to relations with parents.
Ottley-O’Connor believes heads “have very few powers around the online abuse campaigns that in some cases can result in a public ‘pile-on’ of abuse”.
Pensby school used rental income, which has raised more than £800,000 over the past five years, to pay for the legal action
But Ottley-O’Connor warns that those without access to that kind of cash and governing bodies with the same capacity either have to “live with the abuse or leave”.
‘Time to address this’
Education Mutual, an organisation that provides insurance cover for thousands of schools, from April will cover legal costs for staff who want to sue social media trolls. This includes a template cease-and-desist letter.
Nick Hurn, a trust chief executive who runs Education Mutual, expects this to “nip 90 per cent of these kinds of activities in the bud, making them realise there are consequences for what they say”.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said last month she was “keen” to learn from the sector how the government should “respond” and “change” to help tackle abusive parents.
The DfE has been contacted for comment.
