School children need to face the consequences of their actions

And so it has come to this. After years of schools reporting an escalation in aggressive and entitled behaviour from some parents, private school principals are asking parents to sign onto explicit codes of conduct, contracts or behaviour agreements to curb these unhelpful interventions.

At Barker College on Sydney’s north shore, headmaster Phillip Heath is asking parents to sign a charter agreeing to support school decisions.

The charter was necessary on legal advice, he told our reporter Emily Kowal, detailing an increasing tendency on the part of some parents to “weaponise” disputes, calling in lawyers or the police when unhappy with the school. Parents are using AI to save them time crafting complaints that then presumably tie up valuable school resources.

Parents, Heath said, wanted maximum discipline meted out to other children, but their child treated with kid gloves.

In Victoria, the exclusive Geelong Grammar School has reportedly asked parents of girls who left its signature bush campus to go to a pub, to sign a contract confirming the school’s right to punish their children as it sees fit. Girls whose parents do not sign will not be welcomed back to the school.

This followed the mother of one of the absconders complaining that the school’s chosen punishment – making misbehaving students sleep in isolated tents for five nights – contravened Article 37 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. If the school had run an AI detection device over her submission, what would it have found?

Geelong Grammar charges $94,000 for its year-long Timbertop program. No doubt the hefty fees many elite private schools now pocket engender an expectation among some parents that as paying customers they have a right to expect a certain level of service from the retailers selling them a prestigious consumer good.

But disrespect for school leaders and teachers is not isolated to private schools, unfortunately. The NSW upper house is now considering legislation to give principals the power to ban parents from school grounds if they engage in unreasonable and harmful behaviour.

The proposed laws would cover public, Catholic and independent sectors, and are a response to bullying and harassment from parents, which is becoming routine. A minority of parents engages in this behaviour, but its impact is sizeable on the mental health of those subjected to it.

Of course, sometimes parents must advocate for their child, and no school is perfect. For serious matters, a serious response may be necessary. But for the most part, the best course of action is to work with a school to try to remedy problems.

Using parent power to protect your children from the consequences of their actions is not setting them up to succeed. It will not help them to build the resilience they need to cope with life’s knocks, and it will deliver the false lesson that they are entitled to special treatment.

Parents need to be willing to accept that sometimes their child may be in the wrong, and that a truly valuable education often entails the priceless experience of learning from your mistakes.

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