TEACHERS who are being hit by their students should be asking themselves what went wrong in their relationship, the Education Minister said yesterday.
Speaking on CyBC radio’s breakfast show Andreas Demetriou said a student who hit his teacher “obviously has a huge problem” but “on the other hand if a teacher is struck by a student it is an equally big problem for the teaching community in the sense each teacher has to ask what went wrong in his relationship with the student and each head teacher has to ask what responsibility he has in displays of such behaviours”.
Demetriou’s comments are sure to infuriate teachers union OELMEK which was yesterday already calling for a meeting with the minister to discuss the growing issue of delinquent behaviours in schools.
OELMEK president Eleni Semelidou questioned how bad the situation had to get before something was done to address the problem.
“There are students with serious problems where the existing system cannot offer them real help,” she said.
“Only recently a colleague was hit and is in hospital while a female student was hit by someone from another school during school hours. So do teachers and students have to have their lives threatened each time for the issue to be made public and the same old, same old?”
Semelidou said the union had already scheduled a meeting with the Education Minister later this week and had plans to bring up the issue.
“We want his clear position [on the matter],” she said.
But Demetriou said talking about the issue of delinquency on a daily basis would do nothing to deal with the problem.
He said there was already a rapid reaction group in place which took calls from schools where a serious incident had occurred. The group then investigated and addressed the issue immediately, said Demetriou. The minister said each school had appointed an individual responsible for communicating between the ministry and this group. Moreover an observation post had also been set up to monitor anti-social behaviours in schools so that policies could be drawn up, he said.
“These measures have been in place about a year. It is wrong for someone to expect the incidences to dwindle down to zero. I don’t believe by discussing these issues every day it contributes towards dealing with delinquency,” he said.
The minister’s comments are unlikely to pacify Semelidou who made it clear she was well aware of the steps already in place to tackle the problem.
According to her, there were other intervention methods that had been included in a special report into the issue which were not being promoted and which OELMEK wanted to see adopted.
