Gervase Phinn: The lost art of saying 'no'

Well, when my children were small there was no discussion or negotiation; they were given firm guidelines and clear parameters about how to behave and the word "No" was frequently used.

At the same time as this research appeared, the Times Educational Supplement ran an article about what teachers discuss behind the staff room door. In my experience, the conversation predictably turns to behaviour and the role of the parent. "Of course, I blame the parents," is the usual refrain. "If they exerted a bit more discipline at home and supported the school more, then we wouldn't have to deal with these truculent and unruly children."

There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this. If I had gone home as a child and told my parents that I had been in trouble at school, I would have been in more trouble.

Parents often come in for criticism from teachers – the pushy one who thinks Tamsin is naturally gifted, the uninterested one who sends the reading book back as "it's the teacher's job to learn them how to read and not mine", the neurotic one who believes his child has every condition under the sun from dyslexia to irritable bowel syndrome, the know-it-all who tries to teach the teachers their job, the interfering, the rude and the aggressive. One could add to the list.

"Most of the parents are the salt of the earth," one headteacher told me. Then he rolled his eyes. "But some... I despair!" He then related a catalogue of incidents.

"I have been shouted at by parents, called Hitler, accused of victimisation and child cruelty but there have been some lighter moments. One young mother with four children – she can't have been much older than 18 – had real problems filling in the forms when she registered the children to start school. She knew the children's dates of birth and who the fathers were but when I asked if all the children were natural-born British citizens, she told me that the youngest child was born by Caesarean. When it got to 'length of residence', she said it was about 50ft although she couldn't be sure. I once asked a young lone-parent mother, whose son had a wonderful head of curly ginger hair, if the boy's father was redheaded, too. 'I don't know,' she had told me in all seriousness, 'he kept his cap on'.''

In this day and age, of course, teachers have to be very careful in dealing with parents and in what they say about the children they teach. How headteachers must yearn for the past when the position they held allowed them to send letters home like this one from the headmistress of Brampton New National Schools, written to parents in 1871: "You must remember that you have not done all that is required by merely gaining admission for your child into our school. Do not suppose that its education is to be left entirely to the care of the master or mistress, and that you are to do nothing. Unless you labour together with them for your child's welfare, disappointment to all parties will be the result."