Teachers' union secretary Mary Bousted blames some parents for problems in British schools

Writing in today's Observer, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers Mary Bousted blames some parents for the indiscipline some children have, saying "My members tell me that parents often also come into school and threaten staff and some staff have been attacked by a pupil's parents. One father encouraged his child to start a fight in the playground before school started. A parent provided a raw egg for a pupil to smash over a teacher's head. A primary teacher reported that a parent swore and shouted at him."

I have seen the behaviour of children getting worse and worse.

Recently I was in Harrow and Wealdstone, near where I used to live, with a colleague, and some children, no more than ten or eleven, ran past shouting swearwords. One little boy looked at us and sneered "Give us a fiver and I'll strip for you."

What has happened to our children? Is it a more materialist culture that judges people by what they wear?

Is it to do with the targeting of advertising at children which encourages them to wear parents down with endless pestering for expensive toys and sweets that cause short attention spans?

Is it the social decay that recession has brought on? Walking through Leytonstone to the Iceland this weekend, I walked past smashed beer bottles and recycling boxes piled high with litter.

London is a grim, grim city at the moment. I don't think other cities are as bad, but I wonder what children think of the rising social decay.

However, I think some people are simply awful. Some of these make up a tiny minority of Britain's parents, and awful parents who care more about material comforts than bringing up children will produce awful children. And awful children ruin the lives of good children.

Teachers can do their best to help good children succed with life, but it doesn't help when those in charge think teaching is the problem, and when they are afraid to fight back against violent children in case they will be accused of assualt.

We need a national debate on how to make sure every child is brought up properly, allows other children to learn properly, and becomes a part of society, not a predator.

Ms Bousted's article is a valuable contribution to that debate, as is Frank Chalk's blog and the programmes produced by Alex Dolan and Angela Mason, although some would disagree.