A new wave of violent and disruptive behaviour is evident in our primary schools, according to the INTO. And the situation is becomingcritical as teachers feel under siege and other students are being heldback.

'I'll bleedin' kill you. I'll burn your car out, I'll knife you," the schoolboy says, making as if to headbutt the teacher in the schoolyard. As he continues to push against him aggressively, the male teacher calls in the school caretaker for reinforcement.

Eventually, the student is sent to the principal's office, and a letter written home to his mother telling her he has been suspended from school.

The boy in question is 12 years old.

The scene described above, which took place in a Dublin school recently, is by no means typical of primary schools around the country. However, according to the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO), the number of telephone calls it has received to its head office from teachers dealing with the effects of disruptive behaviour from primary school students has significantly increased in recent weeks.

During one week last month, the union was receiving an average of three such calls each day.

The situation is so serious that it has led one INTO branch demanding that the Department of Education issue revised guidelines to schools, just to ensure "the right of teachers to teach and children to receive their education in a pleasant and orderly atmosphere free from frequent disruptive behaviour".

"Teachers describe continually aggressive behaviour among a small number of pupils which leads to regular disruption of classes," says John Carr, general secretary of the INTO.

"Some teachers are ringing up almost at the point of despair, stating that not only are these children learning nothing but that they are stopping other children from learning. These situations are seriously stressful for teachers, who simply wish to be allowed to do their jobs to the best of their ability."

Among the incidents reported to the INTO are physical attacks on teachers and other staff, regular attacks on other pupils, sometimes causing serious harm, as well as other "low level" activity such as abusive language, spitting and name-calling.

While the majority of the students involved would be in the older classes at primary school, some would be as young as eight years old.

Such behaviour has a serious impact on the ability of teachers to do their job, they say.

"I find it very stressful. You are constantly tense, working and trying to anticipate where the next disruption is coming from," explains one teacher, who did not wish to be named. "You are trying to minimise the disruption. . . 75 per cent of your concentration is on trying to keep control, rather than teaching the lesson."

Nor is this disruptive behaviour confined to so-called "tough" schools.

"We would be seen as a middle-class school, where a lot of the kids would be seen as academically ambitious," says one teacher. "But there are some disruptive children too. They are well-meaning, but highly volatile children, who you could never leave unsupervised. There is a danger that they would attack other students.

"Occasionally, physical fights would erupt in the classroom . . . I remember a particular class where there would be verbal abuse to myself and the principal. When I called him, some of the children would challenge him with foul language."

One of the reasons for this, he says, is because some students get bored very easily. So their initial reaction is to "rear up". He finds they need some form of sport every day just to let off steam.

"It is stressful. The biggest frustration is the fact that you feel some of the nicer, gentler kids are not getting a chance. Instead of being nice and relaxed with the class, you have to be more authoritarian and strong just to maintain control," he says.

Dr Catherine Mulryan is a lecturer in education at St Patrick's, teacher training college in Drumcondra, Dublin. She believes there is a strong link between effective teaching and the maintenance of discipline.

While she teaches her students to differentiate between being authoritarian and authoritative, she admits that with class-sizes as high as 35, it can sometimes be difficult to make such a neat distinction.

"Research has shown that a class size of around 20 is the ideal. If you have a problem child in a class of 35, it can cause an awful lot of grief. In smaller classes, it is easier to contain the problem," she says.

The ideal situation, she believes, is to maximise the academic learning time - the amount of time actively spent learning - while minimising the amount of disruption. But if a child constantly disrupts, there is a relatively high likelihood that the learning of others in the class is going to be affected.

Indeed, Mulryan knows of one school where a teaching assistant is assigned primarily just to sit with one child in order to stop him from disrupting the other students in the class.

She agrees that there are probably more children manifesting serious behavioural problems than 10 to 15 years ago. She attributes this, in part, to the increasingly diverse nature of the Irish school system.

"Teaching is a much more difficult job nowadays than it was in the past," she points out. "Ten to 15 years ago, you didn't have as many non-nationals in your class, needing special language tuition, for example. You didn't have the integration of Down's syndrome children, either. The diversity in classes is unparalleled in Irish education.

"You can get serious indiscipline at all levels. For example, bullying is learned behaviour, and research has shown that it is learned at home. I have even heard of one parent who, when his kid was accused of bullying, arrived at the door of the school and started to bully the teacher," Mulryan says.

"If you are failing the children in your class and not meeting their needs, you are wasting your time. Their self-esteem and motivation is affected. They won't be motivated to come to school at all. They are watching everybody else succeeding."

According to Mulryan, "children react in different ways to failure. There can be overreactive or underreactive behaviour. They can be passive, just sitting there, or they can be a "messer", she says. "I'd be as worried about the others who don't react. They might be depressed down the line."

Clearly, thediscipline is a growing concern for primary teachers.

One obvious solution, suggests Mulryan, would be to reduce class sizes, with one possible knock-on effect being that schools might need less special needs assistants.

As the situation currently stands, however, something desperately needs to be done, says one school principal.

Clearly exasperated, he explains that with little support from home, the feeling is that primary schools are wasting their time trying to tackle the question of discipline.

"We're maintaining children in the system rather than improving them," he says. "There is no control, no back-up from home. No respect. And the Department has no solutions. The allocation of a (resource) teacher is seen as the answer to all ills."