When it comes to education, the great playwright and political activist George Bernard Shaw has a lot to answer for. If you look around the internet, the notoriously shallow minded generalisation that “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches” is a line from Shaw’s immensely popular 1903 play Man and Superman.

It’s a phrase that still lingers unpleasantly more than a century on, though for the record you won’t ever hear it in any production of the play as it’s not actually part of the playscript at all but rather appears in any accompanying text called The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion by John Tanner MIRC (Member of the Idle Rich Class) – John “Jack’ Tanner being the central Don Juan character in the actual play script.

It’s also highly likely that Shaw was actually borrowing from Aristotle, who once said far more reasonably: “Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach.”

An academic point certainly, and one that won’t bring too much comfort to hard-working teachers who’ve long had to live with unpleasantly ambiguous assumptions about their chosen vocation.

In more recent times perceptions of teaching as a profession remain divisive and unresolved – for some it’s seen as a much-envied life with high pay and numerous holidays, whilst for others it’s the source of pretty much all that has gone wrong with society. For those working on the inside, the days of generous pay, gentle vocation and lengthy summer breaks are no more than a mere nostalgic idyll that might possibly have happened way back in the 1960s. As to education – or rather our education system – being at the heart of all that’s gone wrong in contemporary society, most teachers would probably agree, though this has little to do with individual people and everything to do with structures and hierarchies.

As someone who went through the UK school system – both rural and urban – across the 1960s and 70s it certainly seemed to me that fundamentally different processes were in operation back then. Most notable in my memory was that the teaching profession began in the more senior schools, and ended in primary. There was a perception that new teachers were best deployed teaching older children who had the maturity to listen and work on their own initiative, whist only the most senior and experienced teachers could be entrusted with the youngest and most impressionable students. Today that overarching policy seems to have become reversed, and with some justification – inexperienced teachers are best paired with the most compliant and cooperative age groups, whist only the most time-hardened and robust teachers can be confronted with older groups where behavioural problems have now become a highly dangerous epidemic.

The common tendency is play the great British nostalgia card and assume that social problems and public morality has somehow disintegrated over the past half century, when in fact there is ample evidence that all these pressures were just as evident in decades past, rather it’s how society has chosen to deal with them that has created the chaos and structural breakdowns we now see running throughout our education system.

Since modern education began, there has never been so much scrutiny and so much intervention, yet so many systemic failures. And teachers are trying their best to carry out their vocation, make a meaningful difference and give future hope to our children in a landscape that more often than not is little short of an urban war zone – one only has to look to Mondays’ dreadful tragedy at All Saints Catholic High School in Sheffield, or the stabbing of two teachers at Ysgol Dyffryn Aman, Carmarthenshire.

It is almost 30 years since the murder of headmaster Philip Lawrence, who was stabbed to death on 8^th December 1995 outside the gates of his Catholic school in London when he went to the aid of a pupil who was being attacked by a gang. Philip had taught in several London schools before becoming head at St. George’s Roman Catholic School, Maida Vale, which had been plagued by behavioural issues and academic underperformance. During the two-year period of his headship, the school’s exam results and reputation improved significantly, but Philip’s murder gave fresh urgency to questions that were already being asked about the safety of both pupils and teachers across the UK’s education system.

Just a year earlier 12-year-old Nikki Conroy had been fatally stabbed by an intruder who had got into her Middlesbrough School, and of course 16 children and their teacher had been murdered at Dunblane in March 1996. In July that same year nursery nurse Lisa Potts and several children were wounded by a machete-wielding intruder in their nursery school in Wolverhampton. In response to these and other growing incidents of violence against teachers and pupils there was a general countrywide tightening of security measures at schools, which was focussed largely in areas where general crime rates were high – on the completely erroneous assumption that wider community crime levels was likely to translate into school-based incidents.

At around the same time the narrative of knife crime education programmes in schools and their surrounding communities was often presented as the appropriate and proportionate response to a growing and deadly threat to school pupils and staff, but it’s now abundantly and tragically clear that this has done little to address or reverse the growing problem of unruly and dangerous behaviours on the school campus.

It was no doubt with this growing worry in mind that teachers at an East Dumbartonshire school in Scotland announced this week that they plan to take industrial action over abusive and violent pupil behaviour, and what they allege has been ‘gaslighting’ by management, including being told that their classes weren’t exciting enough.

Mike Corbett, a Scotland national official for the NASUWT, told the BBC: “Members feel blamed and gaslit by management for the poor behaviour of pupils.

“They report being told at debriefing meetings that their lessons are ‘not fun or engaging enough’.

“A culture where there are no consequences for poor behaviour is not setting up pupils well for adult life and fails the employers’ duty of care towards its staff.

No doubt this will ring alarm bells for many teachers across the UK, and this the first time that teachers in Scotland have taken such a step. In November 2022 teachers at Bannerman High School in Glasgow announced 12 days of strike action over what it alleged was the school management’s failure to address violent and abusive pupil behaviour. Teachers said that they had been subjected to shoving and abusive outbursts, being threatening with screwdrivers and were having to cope with incidents of physical damage to the school building and theft of pupils’ property.

In 2023, research commissioned by the Scottish government on behaviour in schools found 67% of teachers experienced general verbal abuse, 59% physical aggression and 43% physical violence between pupils in the week preceding the survey.

In the wake of this and other incidents in schools across Scotland, the University of West Scotland conducted a national research project on teacher workloads. In collaboration with Cardiff Metropolitan University and Birmingham City University. The research team asked 1,834 teachers in primary, secondary and special schools in Scotland to fill out online diaries, logging how they spent their time over one week in March 2024.

Their findings relate to Scotland, but the red flags will resound with teachers across the UK.

Typically, it found that teachers in all types of schools are working far more than their contracted hours, and an increasingly complex and out-of-control education system was making demands of them that exceeded the support and resources available. There was also a major impact from increased levels of cultural and linguistic diversity in the classroom, as well as growing numbers of children with additional support needs in a landscape where access to the vital specialist support that these children need is reducing rapidly. Researchers also felt it was significant that teachers are spending more than half of their non-teaching time creating their own mechanisms for dealing with the diverse needs of their pupils, and admin and other management tasks were pretty much absorbing any remaining free time. In essence, just 35 minutes a week was available for professional learning and training and, not surprisingly, 75% of teachers said they were either wanting to leave the profession or retire.

According to the House of Commons Research Briefing (Dec 2023), over the past decade, the overall number of teachers in state-funded schools has not kept pace with increasing pupil numbers. Additionally, teacher vacancies have risen over this period – in the academic year 2023/24, postgraduate teacher recruitment was a worrying 38% below target. Of course this is nothing new, UK government policies have consistently failed to recruit enough teachers for years. In particular, a whole string of education reforms introduced by the Conservative government of David Cameron promised to ‘revolutionise and reinvigorate’ our education system and attract large numbers of new teachers. However the project was centred on providing financial incentives for training – a typically flawed Tory assumption that money would overcome all other reluctances. Perhaps most significantly it takes time to train teachers, and a rolling inconsistency in government policies and incentives over the years has meant that a growing teacher shortage is not being addressed effectively, or in a sustained manner.

Sadly it does seem that we are now heading towards a genuine crisis point. The UK education system is haemorrhaging good and committed teachers at an alarming rate and that creates unreasonable and highly dangerous pressures on our entirely performance-led schools to paste over the growing cracks in their establishment. This isn’t helped either by successive governments insisting that they are committed to resolving the education crisis with programmes and initiatives that make little impact on the real ground-level problems that schools, and especially teachers, are having to cope with.

As we heard from Swansea Crown Court this week in the Ysgol Dyffryn Aman stabbings case, and we will undoubtedly hear from the dreadful fatal stabbing of Harvey Willgoose at All Saints Catholic High School, Sheffield, the landscape in which we are asking teachers to educate our children has profound and worsening challenges that few agencies are really stepping up to resolve. By and large it is being left to educationalists to cope with social breakdown, violent behaviour and impossible professional expectations. As one distressed parent outside All Saints pleaded: “we just want our children to be safe.”

We can only hope that those who determine such things are listening, and recognise that urgently ensuring the very basic safety of all who work in our schools is fundamentally more important than any propping up of meaningless performance statistics in order to protect political positions.

For now our thoughts and prayers are for Harvey Willgoose, his parents, family, friends, and teachers at the school.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and public theologian

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• The Right Reverend Ralph Heskett, Bishop of Hallam, has announced that a Mass will be be held for Harvey Willgoose at St Joseph’s Catholic Church , 6 St Joseph’s Road, Handsworth, Sheffield S13 9AT at 10am on Saturday.