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Education and Inspections Bill

It is a long time since I was in a school classroom and had a blackboard rubber lobbed at me for talking. I hate to think what would happen to a teacher who did that today, although I am not that old and it was not that long ago. We would not have dreamed of taking action against a teacher or accusing a teacher of anything. Unfortunately, things have changed. One teacher recently said to me of her classroom, ““It’s a war zone in there.”” Today’s pupils grow up in a rights-aware society—they are rights-savvy. They know what their rights are, and some use them in a way that we would not expect. Indeed, parents encourage them to do so. We ask our teachers to put up with an incredible amount in the classroom because society has changed. We live in a society where one in four nurses is attacked in an accident and emergency department on a Saturday night.