Two cases of violence between pupils at primary schools have recently attracted attention in the media.
At Borup Skole in Køge Municipality, a group of concerned parents have complained regarding violence and sexual abuse between the school’s students.
At Agerup Skole in Odense Municipality, a group of 100 parents have written a letter of concern regarding violence and transgressive behavior between students at the school.
According to the parents, the gross and unacceptable behavior covers threats by students with knives up to the 4th grade, consumption of alcohol and euphoric drugs, violations of a sexual nature and violence and beatings on the occasion of children turning 11 years old.
Experts with real opinions
For decades, the Ministry of Education, KL, the municipalities and politicizing experts with “the right” opinions, far removed from the reality of primary schools, have put violence in schools at the bottom of the big political pickle. Because it does not fit in with school policy glossy images of the “inclusive” public school.
“We are without rights. We are often the only adult with the child in the situation. So we advise once morest all our employees and managers physically touching the children in any way,” was the clear warning from the school leaders’ chairman, Claus Hjortdal, at a hearing in Christiansborg on violence, harassment and threats in the school in 2021.
“To put it provocatively, you cannot treat the teachers as a subordinate service employee and expect respect in class,” stated DPU professor Per Fibæk Laursen at the same hearing.
He believed that it would give a boost to teachers to change the teacher training to master’s level. I agree.
Introduce two-teacher schemes
I do not reveal the bad personnel policy in the primary school. It reveals itself.
37 percent of teachers and 60 percent of kindergarten class teachers in primary schools have been exposed to physical violence on the job in the form of e.g. punches, kicks, pushes or splashes of saliva during the past year.
In special schools, the figure is 74 percent, shows a new member survey among 11,000 members from the Danish Teachers’ Association. Corresponding studies in 2019 and 2021 gave the same results.
The chairman of the Teachers’ Association’s working environment committee, Thomas Andreasen, emphasizes that the results of the member survey are an expression of the extremely stressful everyday life in schools.
– The framework around the students and teaching is under too much pressure because there are not the necessary teacher resources. And we know that when everyday life is stressful, conflicts arise more easily, which can result in some students or others in their environment reacting by hitting, spitting or kicking, he says.
Two-teacher schemes can help solve the problems, believes Thomas Andreasen, but he doubts that there are more teachers on the way.
Advertised teacher billion
Violence in schools should be a thing of the past!
Although 20 per cent of the primary school teachers do not have a teacher’s training, over the last year, despite the advertised extra “billion teachers”, there have been 1000 fewer, not more, teachers in the municipalities.
Education Minister Mattias Tesfaye (S) will have investigated the extent of violence and violations in primary schools.
His predecessor as Minister of Education, Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil (S), dropped an investigation several years ago that might have provided some of the answers sought following the Borup case.
2024-02-25 18:43:02
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