Irish husband of slain teacher Anne Maguire grieves

This is the grieving Irish husband of slain school teacher Anne Maguire.

Don Maguire (62), a landscape gardener, is pictured here leaving the couple's home in Leeds, Britainyesterday.

Mrs Maguire (61) was weeks away from retiring when she was killed during a Spanish class on Monday.

She would have taught her last lesson in July before retiring in September.

The couple had been married for 37 years. They had raised two successful daughters, Kerry, 32, a trainee osteopath, and Emma, 30, who trained at the Royal Ballet School and has been a soloist of the Royal Ballet since 2011.

Mrs Maguire's killing has highlighted the risks inner city teachers in the UK take every day dealing with threats of violence in the classroom.

Her death is thought to be the first time a teacher has been fatally stabbed in a British classroom, and the first killing of a teacher in a school since the 1996 Dunblane massacre.

But the trauma suffered by many in the profession is shown in shocking personal accounts by teachers, often speaking on condition of anonymity.

Emma, a teaching assistant at a pupil referral unit in the West Midlands, has been “punched, kicked, sworn at, insulted, head butted, scratched, screamed at, bitten and had things thrown at me, most notably a table in my first week!” She copes with verbal abuse from pupils by imagining she is “surrounded by an invisible impenetrable barrier”. Although it’s “not an easy job” it is “highly rewarding” but having “a thick skin is a definite advantage.”

Alan Newland, a former headteacher in London, recalls an occasion where a 10-year-old boy brought a large penknife into school: “It came as a bit of shock because it had never happened before, we weren’t expecting it. I didn’t have a policy on kids bringing knives into school.”

He said: “He was threatening people with it. He was doing it in a jokey way but nevertheless the kid had a bit of a volatile background and when I took the knife from him his parents came in and demanded it back.”

Mr Newland said: “Where I’ve had issues with the threat of violence is not with kids but from the parents... I’ve had parents literally say to me ‘you do that and I’m going to fucking beat you to a pulp’ and I had no doubt that actually on the occasions that it happened these people were barely on the edge of self-control.”

Source-Irish Independent