BEING sworn at, spat on, punched, kicked or having items of furniture thrown at them is not what most teachers expect when they sign up for a career in education.

However, previously unseen figures from Southampton City Council reveal that dealing with violent and aggressive behaviour is becoming an undisclosed part of the job description.

Data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows physical assaults on adults are far from rare in our schools.

In fact, over the past three years physical assaults have remained among the most common reasons for excluding children from Southampton schools.

The statistics on these pages make depressing reading.

Physical attacks on adults have accounted for 23 permanent exclusions from schools across the city since 2004.

In 2004 - when physical assault was the single most common reason for exclusions - 176 suspensions were imposed on pupils who had physically attacked their teacher. That's more than three teachers a week assaulted by their own pupils.

It does not stop there.

A worrying 2,491 exclusions were imposed for verbal attacks or threatening behaviour to adults between 2004 and 2007. That's enough punishments to suspend all the pupils from two and a half average-sized secondary schools.

However, Southampton is not unique.

According to a study at Leicester University, two thirds of all school staff have been physically or verbally assaulted in the past 12 months and a third said they were considering leaving school because of concerns over their own safety.

Among those surveyed for the report, almost a fifth had been "bitten or hit with a fist" once in the past year.

A further 20 per cent were attacked by a parent and 12 per cent said they no longer reported crimes to the head teacher or governor.

Many teachers said they now refused to walk in parts of the school building, with 26 per cent of female teachers surveyed admitting some corridors were out of limits at certain times.