Aggression towards teachers and principals is being normalised as something to manage, rather than treated as a workplace hazard employers must prevent.
The message reaches the staffroom late in the afternoon: an angry parent is on the way. A teacher has already endured an abusive telephone call. The principal prepares to meet the parent, quietly ensuring another staff member will be nearby. Nobody calls this an emergency. It is simply something to be ‘managed’.
Across Australian schools, teachers and principals are shouted at, threatened, intimidated, publicly vilified and sometimes assaulted. Conduct that would trigger an immediate safety response in many workplaces is instead absorbed into the job. Staff are expected to remain calm, repair the relationship and continue working.
When did exposure to aggression become an occupational expectation – and why is a known hazard treated as a problem of resilience rather than prevention?
The strongest evidence is the Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, which has tracked school leaders since 2011. In 2025, 47.8 per cent of respondents reported physical violence at work, up from 27.3 per cent in 2011. Threats rose from 37.9 to 53.7 per cent, while 87.2 per cent reported some form of offensive behaviour. Students remain responsible for most physical assaults, but parents and caregivers were identified as the source of almost two-thirds of threats and nearly nine in ten cases of cyberbullying.
National evidence for classroom teachers is less complete. An exploratory 2018 La Trobe University survey of 560 teachers found that more than 70 per cent had experienced bullying or harassment by a student in the previous year and almost 60 per cent from parents. Its social-media recruitment means the results cannot represent every teacher, and it predates the recent rise in the longitudinal principal data. The studies differ in method and coverage, but together indicate that aggression is neither rare nor confined to school leaders.
Student violence may arise from immaturity, trauma, disability, mental illness, family dysfunction or unmet educational needs. Understanding these causes is essential, but inclusion cannot mean leaving staff exposed without specialist support, adequate staffing, structured interventions or appropriate alternative settings.
Parents are accountable adults. Concern for a child may explain strong emotion; it does not excuse threats, intimidation, online harassment or violence. The remedies differ, but the consequences often reach the same employee. Whatever its source, foreseeable aggression remains a workplace risk for which the employer is responsible.
Several social changes have converged. Schooling is increasingly presented as a competitive service: the parent becomes a customer and professional judgement something to negotiate. Trust in institutions has declined, while email, parent groups and social media allow anger to become immediate, continuous and public. Public schools also absorb concentrated disadvantage, trauma, disability and unmet behavioural needs without resources equal to that complexity. Wider public discourse has coarsened, and escalation can be rewarded with attention or concessions.
Most complaints are legitimate and deserve respect. Normalisation begins when abuse is treated as merely another complaint: intimidation becomes dissatisfaction and the employee is asked to repair the relationship. Teachers may fear that reporting signals an inability to manage; principals may contain incidents locally to protect their school’s reputation. If reporting brings no stronger protection, silence becomes rational.
The double standard is stark online. Governments rightly warn that cyberbullying can cause children profound psychological injury and contribute to self-harm. Yet abusive emails, defamatory accusations and social-media campaigns against educators attract far less urgency. The mechanism does not change because the target is an adult.
Normalisation causes a second injury: the first is inflicted by the aggressor; the second when the employer minimises it and returns the worker to the same uncontrolled hazard.
Beyond physical injury, repeated threats and humiliation produce disturbed sleep, anxiety, hypervigilance, panic and fear of the next call or encounter. There is moral injury when people who entered education to serve young people are blamed for failing to manage an aggressor or required to resume contact without protection.
Aggression is not the sole cause of teacher attrition; workload, administration, resources and declining autonomy also matter. But abuse carries a corrosive message: the system values the service more than the person providing it. Absence rises, experienced staff avoid difficult schools and potential leaders decide the risk is not worth taking. Harm to one employee becomes lost capacity across a school.
The NSW Department of Education requires significant safety incidents to be reported and must therefore hold substantial information. Yet there is no clear, regular public account distinguishing aggression by students, parents and others; injuries and absences; or repeated incidents. Without it, staff and the public cannot judge the scale, concentration or effectiveness of controls.
Withholding data may be defended as protecting school reputation, particularly where disclosure could stigmatise disadvantaged communities. But concealment protects the appearance of safety, not workers. Trust grows when an institution identifies a problem honestly and shows that its response works.
‘Wellbeing’ asks how a distressed employee can be supported. Work health and safety asks why the employee was exposed and what the employer did to eliminate or minimise the hazard. Under NSW law, the department must ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, workers’ physical and psychological health and safety. Aggression, threats, violence and persistent abusive communication are recognised hazards.
Policies, training, reporting and counselling may help, but their existence does not prove the duty has been met. Stronger controls lie in the system of work: secure access, adequate staffing, supported meetings, limits on abusive contact, rapid senior intervention, consequences for repeated aggression, protection from online harassment and review of recurring incidents. Rising aggression and absent evidence of consistently effective controls raise a serious compliance question; legal responsibility cannot be transferred to an employee’s composure.
The department should publish annual de-identified data on incidents, sources, injuries, absences and recurrence. Every school needs a statewide response framework stating when an incident must be reported, what immediate protection follows and when responsibility transfers from teacher to principal, then to the director, educational leadership or a central specialist team. Teachers, principals, health and safety representatives and unions must be consulted, and every serious incident should trigger a review of what failed. Accountability is not the number of reports filed or counselling sessions offered; it is fewer workers harmed and fewer known dangers repeated.
At the end of the afternoon, the teacher and principal will return to their work. The incident may be recorded and counselling offered. Unless the conditions that permitted it change, another employee will face the same danger.
Schools cannot teach respect while expecting their staff to endure abuse. Transparency may produce uncomfortable headlines; silence produces injured workers, abandoned careers and preventable repetition. Teachers and principals are entitled not merely to sympathy after harm, but to an employer that acts before they are harmed again.
John Frew worked in public education, including as foundation principal at a secondary school for students with Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Disturbance. John has authored numerous books the latest being ‘Neuroscience and Teaching Very Difficult Kids’. Since retiring, he has continued to comment on social issues.