To ask the Minister of Education, given the requirement in paragraph six of TNC2011/2 on tackling violence/abuse against teachers in schools which states the Employing Authority should also collate all information received on incidents of violence or abusive behaviour against teachers and submit an annual report to the Teachers‘ Negotiating Committee (TNC), for information, to detail (i) the number of reports provided to the TNC, broken down by employing authority, in each of the last five years; and (ii) the number of incidents reported in each yearly report, in each of the last five years.

Assaults on school staff are not reported to my Department but instead are reported to the Education Authority (EA).

Paragraph 6 of TNC 2011/2 details that all incidents of abusive behaviour should be reported to the principal of the school or other designated teacher who shall then record and report the incident to their Employing Authority.

The Employing Authority is required then to assess the incident and determine if it is reportable under the provisions of the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations Northern Ireland, 1997.

As you state in your question, the Employing Authority should provide an annual report to the Teachers’ Negotiating Committee (TNC) for their information.

While we are aware that collation of these incidents is being maintained by the employing authority, we are only aware of one report being provided to members of TNC by the Education Authority (EA) on behalf of the EA and CCMS in the past five years.

The EA has been maintaining the number of incidents involving assaults against staff and provided the following data in response to previous Assembly Questions, which details reported assaults against staff within both Controlled Schools and Catholic Maintained Schools in each of the past 5 years:

These figures have also been broken down into school type: