Survey highlights how pupil behaviour is getting worse

According to a survey commissioned by the BBC News, pupil behaviour is getting worse, with nearly one in five teachers in England saying they have been hit by a pupil this year.

Conducted on Teacher Tapp, BBC News gained feedback from up to 9,000 teachers in England in February and March.

More primary and secondary teachers reported pupils fighting, pushing and shoving compared with two years ago.

The survey found that 30% of all teachers said they had witnessed pupils fighting, in the week they responded to the questions.

Two in five respondents said they had witnessed aggressively violent behaviour that needed an intervention in a single week.

Fifteen per cent of secondary teachers said they have experienced sexual harassment from a pupil when working at school.

Tom Bennett, former DfE behaviour adviser told BBC One's Breakfast programme on Tuesday that this has been a problem for "decades". He said: "Up until about five or six years ago there wasn't much by way of [teacher] training in behaviour management, which would probably astonish a lot of people," he said.

"We need to make sure schools are looking at teaching the behaviour they need, having boundaries and having consequences - a fairly simple structure but quite hard to put into practice."