Though not a mental health professional, I have benefitted from significant training in mental health first aid, and I encounter the challenges of poor mental health on a weekly, if not daily, basis in my role as a Principal (Headteacher) of an English, publicly funded, all-ability high school, a role I have held in several schools over twenty years, together with professorial roles in higher education, both at the University of Notre Dame (USA), London, and St Mary’s University, England. Researching the philosophy and functionality of education, I also lead a research and collaborative group of schools called Koinonia [1], which formed a significant element of the research pool for the 2024 paper ‘Look Back in Anger – Catholic School Leadership and the Peace-making Tradition’ [2], to which this commentary is directed.

The research evolved from the lived experiences of 40 school Principals (Headteachers), 60% of whom were Heads of State-funded (free) Catholic schools and the other 40% were Heads of non-denominational public schools. The primary phase in England, essentially, is ages 4-11, and the secondary (High school) is either 11-16 or 11-18. From 2020 to 2021, co-extensive with COVID and Lockdown, within the education sector, colleague Headteachers were reporting heightened anxiety, first among pupils and students, then among staff (faculty and non-teaching) and then among parents and carers. The latter was also manifesting aggression in some cases, generating specific risks. While this is not to directly infer specific mental health diagnoses, the heightened manifestation of aggression among some parents and carers across the research pool appeared worthy of investigation. The existence or otherwise of a causal relationship between COVID/Lockdown and this heightened behavior appeared to be a relevant question, together with the measures taken by colleague school leaders to reduce the frequency and amplitude of what spikes in hostility were.  Four observations, or limitations, are relevant. First, this was small-scale research, as it was designed to take a sample at a given time and give a sense check rather than a longitudinal approach over the years, which would yield far more robust data. Second, my positionality as a High School Principal, as well as a researcher, is fully acknowledged. Thirdly, there is more to say in terms of the interplay of socio-economic characteristics and vulnerability/hostility. Finally, it is, of course, the case that many felt the impact, no less more so than children and their families, and I acknowledge the work written on this, which continues as we deal with the outturn of the COVID and post-COVID period [3,4]. However, it remains the case that the specific experiences of teachers in this regard are less discussed, hence this contribution.

Examples of such hostility ranged from a lack of willingness on the part of some parents to support the school in disciplinary matters to a culture of formal complaints, where in the past the matters would have been resolved informally, to real aggression (including threat), which crossed into potential criminality, such as physical assault or the threat thereof. Looking to a specific Catholic view of the role of parents and carers in the education process ¹. recently refocused by the Catholic Church in ‘The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue’ [5], there is certainly a focus on school staff and parents finding common fellowship.  Specifically, “The success of the educational path depends primarily on the principle of mutual cooperation, first and foremost between parents and teachers…” (15) with “a spirit of cooperation between various parties…”). In this model, parents are expected to be proactively involved to fulfil their core mission as parents and strengthen the role of education. When disagreements occur, the document calls for dialogue (82). This having been said, many colleague Headteachers in schools without a religious character also brought similar principles to their work.

The core hypothesis, emerging initially anecdotally from the research pool, was that the prior investment made by schools in developing a relationship with families, over and above the mere statutory and operational measures schools have to follow in their relationship with the legal guardians of the children they educate, (parent-teacher consultation, formal meetings and so on) appeared to offer a degree of mollification to the frequency and amplitude of hostile spikes. It would be reasonable therefore to see this approach as contributing to positive well-being among, often vulnerable and struggling, families.  But to be clear, this hostility was not new, as the paper set out.

Back in 2018, for instance, the school inspectorate for England and Wales, Ofsted ², found that, in both the schools’ and the 16-18 age sectors, relationships with some parents appear among the top causes of moderate or high undue stress at work [6]. There is no shortage of examples of excellent home-school relationships. In some cases, parents come to school to ask for help. All of this contributes to building positive relationships and allows schools to have a beneficial impact on the community. This is when staff feel ‘they are making a difference to the lives of many families’ [ibid]. However, relationships with parents can become a source of stress and workload for a variety of reasons. Lack of support with pupils’ behavior is one area of conflict. Parental expectations are another. Expectations become a problem when they are perceived to be unrealistic or unfair – for instance, to use the example Ofsted give, when parents expect the highest grades for their children despite their child’s lack of effort.

On occasion, complaining morphs into aggression, and the tone becomes abusive or disrespectful. Senior leaders clearly outline a vicious circle that starts with a parent ‘shouting’, others joining in and, as one respondent put it, the situation leads to a ‘mob mentality’. More common were inappropriate behaviors described above, while the subtler ones are ‘not having trust in staff’, ‘disagreeing with teachers’ decisions’, ‘parents not taking teaching assistants seriously’, or not acknowledging the support or skill set of staff. This 2018 report does not go into detail as to the increased weaponizing of social media by disgruntled parents/carers, including ‘invading’ staff social media [7].

¹ It is fully acknowledged that many colleague Headteachers in the full panoply of schools in England often share a similarly powerful view of the role of the parent/carer.

² Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education in England. Ofsted's role is to make sure that organizations providing education, training and childcare services in England do so to a high standard for children and students. Ofsted is responsible for inspecting a range of educational institutions, including state schools and some independent schools. It also inspects childcare, adoption and fostering agencies and initial teacher training, and regulates early years childcare facilities and children's social care services. www.ofsted.gov.uk

The British Academy [8] identified nine specific areas of significance to understand the impact of Covid/Lockdown.

• Increased importance of local communities: The respondents to this survey see themselves as deeply embedded in their communities which, it could be argued, has been both a huge strength, while also making them, on occasion, vulnerable to the fears and frustrations of some families. Schools and other settings are not only at the heart of their communities, but are very accessible, and, particularly during Lockdown, have been to many families, both a symbol of authority and a ‘State actor’, involved not only in education, but also in what can be deemed social work, in feeding children and in supporting families.
• Low and unstable levels of trust in governance: It appeared valid to hypothesize that, to the extent that schools have been perceived to be (and quite rightly) brokers and dispensers of Government policy, they may have also been victims of such suspicion. Never more so, for some parents when schools were asked (required) to host vaccination and testing procedures [9]. The impact of conspiracy theories and false information will always play particularly hard with families who are less resilient.
• Widening geographic inequalities: The respondents to this survey reflect diverse socio-economic contexts. In more challenging locations, schools have reported their work in supporting families in atrocious housing, or living in areas of crime, including drug dealing. What we began to see was the attritional aspect of poor housing and unsafe communities on mental health and well-being, where, prior to COVID, there had been some sort of ‘equilibrium’, but now, the straw really had broken the camel’s back.
• Exacerbated structural inequalities: COVID-19 has led to a response by government which has impacted in differing ways, often amplifying, as well as revealing, existing structural inequalities – with effects on children (including vulnerable children), families with children and young people [10]. The work undertaken by schools reflected this: supporting key worker families, delivering food, maintaining online learning, operating as a de facto drop-in advice centre, acting as an advocate to help write letters to the local government Housing Department. The list was endless; it had nothing to do with the formal role of the school or staff job descriptions but had everything to do with moral purpose.
• Worsened health outcomes and growing health inequalities: Like structural inequalities, health challenges for COVID-19 have tracked vectors of health inequality. Long COVID, the need to triage resources and the impact of delays are all relevant. Deficiencies in home and community care infection prevention and control measures and inequalities in the structure and funding of social care provision were evident, again exacerbated where housing was poor.
• Greater awareness of the importance of mental health: The impact of poor mental health correlates with poverty, not least in the ability to access and leverage the right support.  Children and adults living in households in the lowest 20% income bracket in Great Britain are two to three times more likely to develop mental health problems than those in the highest [11]. Employment status is linked to mental health outcomes, with those who are unemployed or economically inactive having higher rates of common mental health problems than those who are employed [12]. Employment is generally beneficial for mental health. However, the mental health benefits of employment depend on the quality of work; work that is low paid, insecure or poses health risks can be damaging to mental health [11]. Finally, Jones-Rounds, M.L. et al. [13] found that those receiving local Government housing financial relief are more than twice as likely to have a common mental health problem than those not in receipt of it (35.1% as against 14.9%).
• Pressure on revenue streams across the economy: The long-term decline in funding for children with special needs and disabilities was a greatly aggravating factor, affecting the child, their family and, on occasion, the relationship with school. My own school, while ‘mainstream’, also offering a facility as a specialist resource for children with a diagnosis of autism, certainly experienced the pressures on parents, School leaders also reported this could be aggravated on occasion by parents'/carers' own similar diagnosis.  Both the latter were evident in some survey responses [14].
• Rising unemployment and changing labour markets: Employment and household income had fallen, leading to an increased dependency on social security. Many respondents to the survey were serving families experiencing employment insecurity and, in many cases, real poverty. These factors not only led to anxiety and frustration - on occasion, spilling into their relationships with the school - but also contribute to poorer mental health which can impact on the child’s engagement with school.
• Renewed awareness of education and skills: In short, children were not at school, and we were only beginning to understand the impact of lost education on children and young people’s intellectual and social formation, both of which (a) correlate to socio-economic background and (b) can and will affect the dynamics of the home-school relationship³.

³ For instance, Singh, S. et. aL (2020) showed that quality and magnitude of impact is determined by vulnerability factors like developmental age, educational status, pre-existing mental health condition, being economically underprivileged or being quarantined due to infection or fear of infection.

Extensive work has been undertaken to look at the impact of COVID, and, specifically, Lockdown, on aggression levels. Killgore et al. [15], in a recent U.S study, hypothesized that continued lockdowns might be associated with increased feelings of aggression. In the first six months of the pandemic, the Buss-Perry Aggression questionnaire, surveying 5,928 adults distributed from across the United States and comparing families under a lockdown regime, and those not so, showed a significant result for those subject to lockdown. This also mapped for physical and verbal aggression, as well as anger, and hostility.

The vast majority of respondents have seen an increase in levels of hostility experienced from a parent/carer/adult connected with a pupil/student. Clearly, the limitation of this question is that ‘threatening’ to take things further can include the legitimate statement by a parent that they intend to escalate a complaint. However, in follow-up meetings conducted as part of this survey, the general response was that rudeness and lack of civility was, for several respondents, ‘endemic’ and becoming ‘seen as an entitlement’. In considering incidents of concern, we have seen that a repeated issue was aggression and threats (for example, litigation). What appears to characterize incidents during and after the period is the extremely personal nature of criticism. School leaders being blamed for poor behavior was a frequent theme, as was the expectation of immediate availability of staff – including being available out of hours. Another was parents/carers seeming to believe everything their child told them and give less weight to the school’s account (than previously). There also appears to be, in some cases, a blurring of (a) the child’s in-school behavior (b) the child’s social media narrative of their school experience (c) parents’ social media narrative of their child’s experience.

Some schools were inundated with repeated complaints and accusations, clearly commensurate with vexatious complaining. One area was attendance and the implementation of the requirement to monitor attendance, leading to threats of complaint, notwithstanding this being a local and national policy requirement. A common theme was that some parents/carers felt entitled to ‘vent’ with impunity – that the normal checks and balances had gone, and now schools and their staff were a legitimate target. Some respondents spoke of threats to themselves (including the very disturbing case of a school leader being threatened with headbutting).

Strategies that reduced both the frequency and amplitude of incidents of hostility, especially where hard-wired into the life of the school, included the following.

• Empathy compassion and understanding.
• Training in working with parents (including diversity training).
• Speedy and efficacious responses to issues (reducing both anxiety and a feeling of worthlessness among some vulnerable parents).
• Lower staff turnover so that teachers and others are known by name.
• Support staff (in English schools this includes teaching aids and other non-teaching staff) coming from the local community and able to engage with parents in a way they found less threatening/intimidating.
• Frequent, high-quality, accessibly-written school-home communication.
• Always two or more staff/faculty meeting visitors.
• Clarity as to what is expected of any visitor – and support and subsequent enforcement by Governors/Trustees.
• In the case of my own school, our status as a mental health ‘hub’ school where local mental health workers work with my staff on a monthly basis to triangulate support for students and their families

The English education system, like its health and welfare counterparts, has a long tradition of providing free care of reasonable quality such as to maintain core health. During COVID/Lockdown, this was severely compromised, and what we saw was a distinction between duties of care and care. While duties of care were, often with difficulty, maintained, such as a form of education for children, ambulance services, hospitals and the rest, it was the word ‘care’ in its Old High German etymology, meaning ‘grief’ and ‘lament’ which proved the most efficacious in supporting the wellbeing of vulnerable families during this period. Because to grieve and to lament is to have hearts touch – cor ad cor, loquitor – heart speaking to heart. It was in schools’ ability to reach out, to welcome, to notice, to impart significance to the ‘other’ – the alienated, the struggling – where we saw the biggest reduction in the frequency and amplitude of hostility. Ultimately, whether loneliness, alienation and lack of self-worth is a function of toxic modernity or not was not for our paper, but the association of these ‘existences’ with poor mental health, frustration, fear, and pushback were manifest throughout this period.