‘The children are like animals’: The Northumberland secondary faculty the place pupils are accused of attacking pregnant employees and ‘gangs of boys run riot’

Just a couple of weeks ago, headteacher David Nisbet gave this assessment of those in his care at the secondary school he oversees in Northumberland.

‘Like any comprehensive school,’ he ruminated, ‘Behaviour is not perfect.’

That is, perhaps, one way of putting it.

Another member of the school – and former pupil – had another. ‘They’re like animals,’ declared Cerys Burgon to the Daily Mail this week.

It is certainly not a word staff would normally use, but it is fair to say that many of them at Haydon Bridge High School in Hexham believe behaviour among some of the 430 pupils has become so woeful, so relentless, and at times so threatening, that this week 30 of them felt compelled to walk out on strike in protest.

One teacher, speaking on the picket line, called conduct ‘dreadful’, while many more admitted privately that they no longer feel safe doing the job they trained for.

And little wonder, if the picture they paint is anything to go by.

In recent months, reports of violence, misogyny and intimidation have become disturbingly common, with female staff allegedly being surrounded by groups of boys intent on challenging their authority, and a pregnant member of staff reportedly shoved aside as she walked through a corridor.

This is a school, remember, for children aged between 11 and 18, some of whom now stand accused of behaviour you might more commonly associate with a juvenile detention centre.

‘Behaviour isn’t the only issue,’ says engineering teacher Matthew Ainsley, who is also the school’s NEU representative. ‘But it is the main one.

‘We’ve had fights, including a nasty one on the bus. We’ve had gangs of male students who won’t do what female staff ask. Female teachers have been surrounded by groups of boys challenging them for simply asking them to stop playing football or come into class. It’s intimidating.’

He described daily incidents of backchat, refusals, classroom disruptions and confrontations that escalate too quickly for staff to control.

Punishments meant to curb poor behaviour – such as isolation or ‘restart’ sessions intended to encourage reflection – are, says Mr Ainsley, routinely ignored, with pupils walking out of isolation rooms, roaming the corridors or returning to lessons where they immediately resume disrupting the class.

‘There is a general lack of respect, but also what staff are seeing is that there is very little effort going into tackling these issues, which is our main concern. If we have an effective policy and sanctions are enforced, behaviour will improve,’ he says.

Another teacher, a woman on the picket line who asked not to be named, agreed.

‘We know behaviour can be bad in all schools, but we just want an effective policy that will help us deal with it,’ she said. ‘It’s frustrating, and it shouldn’t have come to this. No one wants to strike. We just want to teach them.’

Indeed, even some pupils agree that consequences for bad behaviour at the school are almost meaningless.

Among them was Jack Allan, 17, who told the Daily Mail this week that he had seen teachers struggle to manage pupils who simply refuse to listen.

Just recently, he witnessed the moment a disruptive pupil pushed a pregnant staff member in a corridor.

‘Stuff like that shouldn’t happen,’ he says. ‘He should have been kicked out. For some things, students should just be kicked out of school. We don’t feel like the school is doing much to punish them.’

His friend, Ben Cantwell, also 17, described the same incident as ‘absolutely vulgar behaviour’ while both boys believe that sanctions are treated as a joke by some students.

‘Isolation and restart don’t really do much,’ says Jack. ‘It’s more of a relaxed day of work. It keeps them out of the way, but then they go back to the classroom, and the same thing happens again.’

He thinks the arrival of new staff might have contributed to the decline in behaviour.

‘We’ve grown up here since Year 7, and from Year 7 to Year 11 the behaviour was all right,’ he insisted. ‘But we’ve had a lot of new staff this year and some students don’t get along with them. In my opinion, that’s the main trigger.’

They’re not the only ones to feel the school has changed for the worst.

Cerys Burgon – she who used the word ‘animal’ to describe the behaviour of the boys and girls – now works as the school cleaner, but only a decade ago she too was a pupil and says parts of Haydon Bridge have become almost unrecognisable from the place she once knew.

‘You don’t realise how bad people can be until you have to clean up after them,’ she says. ‘I’ve had to wash off graffiti using disgusting language — the N word, the F word, drawings of willies all over the walls.

‘I was never targeted myself, but I’ve seen and heard a lot of swearing and behaviour you wouldn’t have seen when I was a pupil. I can understand why teachers feel so strongly.’

In particular, it seems, the school’s female teachers.

According to Sean Kelly, branch secretary for the National Education Union, one of the two unions who organised the strike action this week, some staff believe a ‘culture of misogyny’ has taken root at the school, with female teachers targeted in particular.

‘We have raised this with the council, because it is totally unacceptable,’ he said.

He’s not the only one to feel concerned: the mother of one pupil at the school told the Daily Mail of her horror at the misogynistic language her daughter hears from Year 11 boys, blaming social media influencers such as Andrew Tate for normalising hostility towards women.

‘My daughter has come home and repeated some of the things that are being discussed,’ she said. ‘It shows a real problem towards females from some of these teenage lads.

‘It’s worrying and it extends to female teachers as much as other pupils. If they’re taking in horrible views about women online day after day, it makes them feel as though it’s totally OK to repeat it in the outside world and not face any consequences.’

Toxic masculinity, of course, is not just an issue in Haydon Bridge, where the current turmoil mirrors a national pattern, with teachers at several schools – including a primary school, meaning children under the age of 11 – taking to the picket line this year.

In February, teachers at Werneth School in Stockport walked out over what they described as unacceptably poor behaviour, including verbal and physical assaults, followed in May by staff at Westbourne Academy in Ipswich, who staged a two-day strike over pupils roaming corridors, refusing to attend lessons and threatening staff.

Just two months later, primary school teachers at Moorside in Salford went on strike alleging rising levels of violence among the youngsters in their care, including pupils punching and kicking staff and vandalising classrooms.

Teaching unions, meanwhile, have unanimously declared that behaviour problems have worsened across the country in the wake of the pandemic.

‘There isn’t an effective pupil behaviour management policy in place,’ says Sean Kelly.

‘You can’t do any teaching or learning unless behaviour is sorted. Pupil safety, staff safety, behaviour — once you’ve got that sorted, you can start learning. But the fact they haven’t got that in place is a big, big problem.’

Enough of a problem, indeed, for the chair of governors, Maggie Anderson – a widely respected educator with 40 years’ experience, including 30 as a headteacher – to recently step down from her role, apparently due to concerns about spiralling pupil behaviour and the frustrations of staff.

She had taken the role in 2019 after retiring as head of Sele First School in Hexham, which under her leadership became one of the first ‘Beacon’ schools in the country – meaning a school recognised for its excellence.

Alas, this is not a fate that seems set to be shared by Haydon Bridge which, despite its motto ‘Dedication to Excellence’ has increasingly struggled in recent years to uphold even the most basic standards.

Occupying a site once home to an ancient grammar school, the school is positioned on the remote fringes of Northumberland, bordering Cumbria and serves one of the largest and most geographically dispersed catchment areas in England, catering to numerous spread-out villages and small market towns.

The scale of its catchment has always posed challenges, not least in terms of transport, attendance and continuity of pastoral care.

But in recent years those challenges have intensified.

In late 2014, an Ofsted inspection concluded the school was ‘inadequate’ and placed it into special measures.

A controversial consultation on whether to close the school altogether followed, though a determined campaign from parents and local residents eventually halted the plan.

In 2017, Northumberland County Council took over the school’s day-to-day running after academy sponsor Bright Tribe abruptly withdrew, yet although the school left special measures in 2021, its numbers have not recovered. With capacity for around 900 pupils, a little over 400 are currently enrolled.

Meanwhile, the most recent Ofsted monitoring report, published in September, warned that the school needed to ‘address the persistent disruptive behaviour of a minority of pupils which is leading to high levels of suspension’.

In the wake of this, school leaders insisted progress has been made, saying new systems have helped reduce suspensions by more than 30 per cent compared with the same period last year.

In a letter to parents, they pledged to ‘take another look’ at the behaviour policy to ‘make it better still’.

School governor Jon Keyte, whose three children attended the school, said governors have reviewed the behaviour issue repeatedly and ‘do not think the situation is much worse than any other school anywhere in the country’.

He pointed to exclusion figures that are ‘around the national average’ and said this suggests behaviour is ‘not out of the ordinary, insisting that the headteacher is doing his best to support staff while trying to avert strike action’.

‘There has been a great deal of bafflement about why they feel so strongly and why taking strike action is the only answer,’ he said. ‘When the unions were brought in it certainly changed the situation and became more difficult for the head and governors.’

Some local residents echo his view. Retired teacher Dave McPartlan, who lives near the school, said the pupils he saw coming and going near his home seem well-behaved.

But others, such as retired educator David Turner, believe the crisis is more deeply rooted.

‘Where are the parents in all this?’ he asked. ‘Why aren’t they being brought in to sort the kids out? Pushing and intimidating female teachers is disgraceful. But the law and the educational policies aren’t supporting the staff.

‘There was once a time when if staff saw bad behaviour, they would grab hold of you. You touch a student now and they’ll have you up in court. Staff feel undermined. I think the protest is valid.’

Valid or not, it is not set to stop anytime soon, with further strikes scheduled for three days next week, to the undoubted dismay of its headteacher.

In a statement this week, David Nisbet, who joined the school in 2023, spoke of his disappointment over the strike action and his commitment to finding a resolution.

‘We have been working with the unions, staff and the County Council for a number of weeks to find a way forward,’ he wrote. ‘This work will continue. We are doing all we can to minimise the impact on pupils’ education.’

No-one could argue with that aim, although Sean Kelly believes it is too little too late, claiming that school numbers are dropping and parents are taking children out.

‘We don’t want to see the school close, we want to protect it,’ he says. ‘But it’s like watching a slow plane crash. It’s just getting worse and worse and worse.’