I spent years trying to stop my daughter from becoming a teacher. Sure, teaching is a noble profession. Sure, our schools need to be properly staffed. And quadruple sure, I confess my grandchildren need to get an education beyond the knee of their doting grandparents. We are doing an excellent job of numeracy mentoring using the NRL scores on Monday morning.

Teachers have their hands full with problematic students. And then there’s the parents.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

But here’s what I know about teachers – from the point of view of a parent (three kids; six different schools). Too many parents are the absolute worst. You don’t even need to go into a classroom to see how awful they are. Come with me and watch parents in action on the sideline of any school-age sporting fixture. That parent shouting, “Go yourself, Nathan”, is just encouraging their kid to work alone. That parent shouting, “I’m blind, I’m deaf, I want to be a ref”, is telling the kid that rules are meant to be broken.

Now, it turns out that teachers – particularly principals – want to leave the education sector. Why? A host of reasons, but here’s the one that stands out – parents. You can imagine being the school leaders at the UK primary school that just banned two parents. Getting the parents detained in a police cell for 11 hours was a stretch – but I’d love to have seen all the correspondence before it got to that.

We are losing a generation of school leaders because of you and the way you behave when you are in conflict with the school. We are losing a generation of school leaders because the systems – the departments of education across........

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