'Parents should be fined for malicious attacks on teachers'

TEACHERS and politicians in Scotland have offered qualified support to a suggestion that parents should face fines for making "malicious and frivolous" allegations against staff.

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of the Head Teachers (NAHT) in England, believes it is wrong that parents are able to make unfounded complaints "with impunity".

Ann Ballinger, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association, has backed the idea from her English counterparts, warning that any change in the law should not deter parents who have genuine concerns.

Mr Brookes said: "It should not be a one-way process.

"At the moment, parents have carte blanche and there's no redress for making allegations that are malicious, frivolous or actually have a pecuniary outcome – in other words, there's a lottery mentality."

Yesterday, Ms Ballinger said: "The difficulty always is we don't want to silence the genuine complaint. If a child has a genuine complaint to make against a teacher, then that mistake has to be heard and addressed. But where there's malicious intent and where a parent makes malicious complaints against a series of different teachers, as is quite often the case, I absolutely feel action should be taken."

Margaret Smith, the Scottish Liberal Democrats education spokeswoman, said: " Fines are something that should be investigated. We need to get the balance right.

"Obviously, there are some teachers who find themselves subjected to malicious allegations from pupils and parents – that's undoubtedly the case.

"Last week's court case involving a teacher down south gave us some kind of background understanding of the pressures teachers can be put under.

"That was an extreme situation, a tragic situation, but the reality in lots of schools is that teachers are being put under extreme pressure, not just in the classroom, but from allegations from parents."

Ms Ballinger added: "There was one parent whose child had attended every school in the local authority and on each occasion made a complaint against the support for learning department, naming teachers.

"Each one had been doing exactly what needed to be done to support that child but the parent had different ideas. All complaints have to be investigated so teachers went through multiple investigations for no reason.

"I think some parents, if they thought they would be fined, would think twice about making those kinds of complaints."

At the NAHT's annual conference in Liverpool yesterday, Mr Brookes said schools should be able to ask the Local Government Ombudsman to impose fines on parents whose complaints are found to be malicious.

Speaking beforehand, he said: "There's a precedent where parents make these unfounded allegations, we think they should not be able to do that with impunity."

The Conservatives appeared to back plans for fines, with a spokesman saying: "I think that seems like a sensible idea."