‘Britain's strictest headmaster’ tells parents to teach kids better manners

Disciplinarian Barry Smith – known for sending more than 150 pupils at his troubled London school to detention in one day- says parents are the root of pupils' bad behaviour.

The “strictest headteacher” in Britain known for his “army-like” punishments says parents are to blame for the bad behaviour of their children.

Military-style disciplinarian Barry Smith added adults have become “afraid of pupils” and are failing to teach their kids “common courtesy”.

At a previous posting Mr Smith was dubbed the “strictest head” after parents complained about his strong-arm rules.

He reportedly put sick buckets in classrooms to reduce truancy and rolled out a “mandatory smile” regime after kids grunted at him in the mornings.

At his new job at a troubled east London school, he has again come under fire for his mass detentions and after kids accused him of creating a “toxic environment”.

Defending his tactics, he told The Sun: “I don't think that all parents are doing what they should be. Some parents are. When you don't support the school, you don't support your child in many cases.”

At a posting in Norfolk in 2017, Mr Smith enforced a "smiling" regime and put sick buckets in classrooms to stop kids hiding behind illness to play truant ( 

Mr Smith's rulebook was first revealed in 2017 after he took over a failing high school in Norfolk.

At the new-and-improved Great Yarmouth Charter Academy, Norfolk, rules bled into home life when he ordered kids to be asleep at 9.30pm and up by 6.30am every day.

He also told pupils to walk in single file on the way to class and threatened to bring them a bucket to throw up in if they complained of illness.

The idea behind the bizarre punishment was to reduce truancy and prevent kids hiding behind sickness to stay away from the classroom.

Outraged parents branded the moves “army-like” behaviour and claimed their kids were becoming afraid of going to school.

Teachers said they felt Mr Smith's punishment regime became excessive after being told to keep kids behind for the most trivial of infringements – like not smiling or shuffling through the corridors.

And parents at Mr Smith’s new posting, Hackney New School in East London, have claimed he called the kids “detainees” and rolled out mass detentions.

He was hired by the troubled school in February last year and has reportedly dished out 7,500 detentions.

On one day last year, he made half of the entire school body – 150 – stay behind after school.

The teacher has come out to defend his punishments, and says that kids need to understand where they sit in a school's pecking order.

But to justify his actions, the teacher said: “I think we bend over backwards to accommodate children and I think instead of accommodating this behaviour we need to promote good behaviour. We need to be more active.”

As published on the Daily Mirror website, 5 November 2021.

Picture credit: Unknown.

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