Lib Dems tell BBC Scotland who then tell us there were more than 30 000 ‘attacks’ on teachers but NOT why only 3 sought compensation

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Militant leader Larry Flanagan

Based on a Freedom of Information request by the Lib Dems, fed to Reporting Scotland’s intrepid investigative reporters, we hear that there were almost 30 000 ‘attacks’ on teacher in the last three years. So, that’s about 10 000 per year.

We don’t get a reminder of their report on the 29th December 2019: ‘More than £100 000 for teachers attacked by pupils’ which, to my surprise revealed that there had been only 3 cases in 2019. Three out of 10 000 suggests that many of these ‘attacks’ may be the product of formulaic record-keeping of, in many cases, the kind of cheek and disobedience not recorded in the past, rather than evidence of actual chaos in classrooms.

One of our regular readers will, I hope, update us on this trend.

Some readers might remember Larry Flanagan as a long-time and trusted friend of social democrats like those in the SNP Government. That other good friend of the independence movement, Paul Hutcheon saw him in these terms:

From Trotskyist revolutionary to Scotland’s most influential teacher … meet Larry Flanagan

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15399274.from-trotskyist-revolutionary-to-scotlands-most-influential-teacher-meet-larry-flanagan/

Flanagan was at Stirling University perhaps at the same time as former FM Jack McConnell, former Defence ‘We’ll not need guns in Helmand’ Minister John Reid and me. I don’t remember him in classes or in the library but I suppose he’d be busy learning to strip and reassemble a Kalashnikov, blindfolded.

4 thoughts on “Lib Dems tell BBC Scotland who then tell us there were more than 30 000 ‘attacks’ on teachers but NOT why only 3 sought compensation”

  2. You are right in your speculation that most of the 30 000 are essentially ‘record keeping’. Something is deemed ‘violent’ if the person who is lodging the item deems it to be violent, by any criterion he or she wishes and does not have to disclose.

    One single person can be responsible for a significant number of items on the register. During the 1980s, I worked in a school in the West of Scotland, which had a complement of 50 teachers. ONE teacher accounted for 57% of all recorded ‘incidents’ over a three year period. Well over half of the teachers made no reports. During the 8 years I was there, there we no incidents of physical assaults on teachers.

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