A LEADING Kent headteacher has blamed powerful commercial corporations for contributing to an increase in child crime and violence.

Eric Spear, the head of Staplehurst Primary School, near Maidstone, made his comments in his first speech as the new president of the National Association of Headteachers.

He said teachers worked hard to promote moral understanding in schools and to encourage pupils to be sensitive and sympathetic to the needs of others. But that was undermined by the consumer culture generated by big companies:

“Sadly, there are powerful forces in modern society that are not contributing to that aim. Powerful commercial interests turn quite young children into consumers who pester parents to shower them with transiently fashionable and very expensive possessions. Shopping and the designer label seem to have become substitutes for spirituality.”

He went on to say that the nation defined itself by what it owned rather than what it was. “The effect on children is plain to see on our streets. What you can’t get by fair means, you get by foul. Quite young children are becoming involved with theft and violent crime.

"It is not that they don’t have an intellectual understanding of the difference between right and wrong. It is that they don’t care about the difference. They do not have the moral commitment which would make them choose right over wrong.”

He also criticised those parents who failed to understand they had a role to play in their children’s education. “Often [parents] only get involved in their child’s school when they want to complain about a punishment for bad behaviour or to oppose an exclusion.

"Too often these same parents find that their child gradually gets out of their control by the time they are at secondary school and often before.”

Mr Spear was speaking to fellow headteachers at the annual NAHT conference in Torquay.