Teachers believe that parents are shirking their responsibilities and expecting the schools to bring up their children for them. Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), said that children were now arriving at school with very poor social skills and an aggressive attitude that they had learned from home.
She told delegates at a conference in Liverpool last month that one mother blamed staff when her 14-year-old daughter became pregnant and another said that the reason her 16-year-old son had become a cannabis user was because his school had offered inadequate drugs education.
"Teachers are becoming increasingly concerned that they are being held responsible for aspects of children and young people's lives which are completely beyond their control," she said.
Ms Bousted's views were echoed by Jules Donaldson, a secondary school teacher employed by Sandwell council in the West Midlands who spoke at the NASUWT teaching union's annual conference in Bournemouth last month."Parents have a lot that they could be doing but there is a major societal problem. In America they are saying 'adults should be seen and not heard'. To a certain extent we are going down that road. At the end of the day parents have a responsibility for their children's behaviour and sometimes they are not willing to accept that," he said. "We have got to a point where some parents will come and say 'I can't do anything with [my children]. Can you sort them out?"
The ATL surveyed 1,000 primary and secondary school teachers and found that four in ten had come across aggressive parents. More than eight in ten teachers had been verbally abused and insulted while over a third had faced physical violence from parents.
Meanwhile, two-thirds of teachers had dealt with students who had punched or kicked while a quarter had experienced students spitting. Shockingly, 1.5 per cent had experienced incidents of knife-related attacks. Not surprisingly, almost half of teachers (45 per cent) said that they had considered changing careers because of the aggression they encountered at work.
But it is not only the teachers who are suffering due to poor behaviour in the classroom. It is estimated that naughty pupils are costing all children a lesson a day. Primary school teachers told a poll conducted for NASUWT that on average half an hour of classroom time was wasted each day because of poor behaviour.
Secondary school teachers said around 50 minutes were lost each day for the same reason. The poll consulted 10,259 teachers who claimed that the most common types of bad behaviour were squabbles or arguments between pupils during lesson time; students refusing to work and pupils' failure to bring homework or equipment to class.
But what can be done to tackle the problem? Some schools are actually making the situation worse, by rewarding good behaviour in pupils, when this should be the norm.
"It is good when people are rewarded for achievement but it has a negative effect if you are being rewarded for what is seen by everyone else as normal behaviour," said Donaldson.
He pointed out that some schools are rewarding the most disruptive pupils while ignoring children who are always well-behaved. As a result, children see it as a "badge of honour" when they are taken out of class and sent to behaviour units, where they enjoy the reward of "toast and tea", he said. He cited other examples where pupils have been given burgers as treats in exchange for better discipline.
Could the answer lie in a return to more traditional ways of treating unruly students? The government certainly seems to think so. Last month, Schools Secretary Ed Balls released guidelines urging teachers to use the full range of powers at their disposal. Under the guidelines, parents can be handed £50 fines and even face court action if they fail to take responsibility for their children's bad behaviour in school.
Teachers would also have the right to use "reasonable force" to restrain unruly pupils and set weekend or evening detentions as well as confiscate property. But a survey from the NASUWT union suggests 60 per cent of teachers are not aware of their powers, and that many believe that "methods of dealing with pupil behaviour are in the most part ineffective" and that behaviour policies are "gathering dust" because the curriculum is so overloaded.
Strangely, while the teaching conferences were focused on the problem of bad behaviour and its causes, the government's behaviour tsar Sir Alan Steer downplayed the situation in his report Learning Behaviour, published last month.
Steer, who was the head of the 1,400-pupil Seven Kings comprehensive in Ilford, east London, for 23 years, insisted there was no crisis in behaviour in schools.
"While there is a legitimate concern in society about standards of behaviour of young people (as in earlier generations), there is strong evidence from a range of sources that the overall standards of behaviour achieved by schools is good and has improved in recent years," he said.
Steer's report, which was labelled as "out of touch" by many in the teaching profession contained a number of unusual ideas for tackling unruly students. He suggested that pupils would benefit from playing quiz games in class such as "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?".
He also claimed that children should not have their own televisions in bedrooms. "I personally would never have wanted my children upstairs in their bedrooms watching the telly," he said, when presenting his report at the NASUWT teaching union's conference.
He also placed the blame on today's permissive celebrity culture. "The sexual life of celebrities is all over the press and yet we wonder why youngsters are sexually active," he said. "If footballers are violent and abusive is it a surprise children are copying them? I'd like to see referees send [players] off by the cartload."
Steer suggested some more traditional methods of discipline as well, such as silence while the teacher took the register and said schools should be graded for the behaviour of their pupils and that this should appear on school report cards. The cards have been proposed by the government as a replacement for league tables.
Poor discipline in schools is undoubtedly a problem, particularly for teachers and other students who suffer as a result. Perhaps the unhappy truth is that we are all to blame. While not every parent may behave aggressively at the school gate or at parent teacher meetings, how many have acted aggressively while driving, or talked disparagingly about others in front of the children at home?
And while it is not practical to try and shield children from their celebrity idols and the bad example they sometimes set, we could try to reinforce the positive message provided by other role models in society, be they sports or showbiz personalities. Steer's advice to remove televisions from children's bedrooms may seem harsh, but when children spend hours on their own away from the rest of the family, who knows what kind of influences they are picking up?
But perhaps the most worrying trend of all is that of lowering our standards. If parents and schools are prepared to reward good behaviour instead of simply expecting it - what kind of message does that send out to the children?
