Nelson College headmaster Gary O'Shea says there is a growing sense of entitlement fuelling students battles with their schools.

The issues that lead students across New Zealand to wage wars on their schools through social media is nothing new, but their sense of entitlement is, a school principal says.

"The beards, the hair, the puffer jackets, the 'I'm unhappy in my class because my teachers aren't working hard enough' – this isn't new," Nelson College headmaster Gary O'Shea said.

"These are literally daily things that happen, kids have always written essays in creative writing about uniforms and authoritarian teachers."

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O'Shea said students needed to be able to express themselves, and teachers should encourage them, but there needed to be processes and boundaries in place as well.

He said students had to be taught to respect a school's cultural norms, which included its uniform regulations and behavioural expectations.

When a student would persistently break the rules, they were "stepping outside of the community ... showing it is more important to the person as an individual to continue to disobey the cultural norm than to be in school."

Parents siding with their children on those issues was becoming a problem, he said.

They would ask him what it had to do with their child's education.

"It has a lot to do with education because it's about buying into a community of learners, the community expectation is that we are a uniformed school and we create a settled, focused environment and a sense of belonging."

A uniform gave a sense of belonging, but did not make a school any better than a mufti school, he said.

He said the students versus schools issues showed that some schools needed to be "more explicit on why they do things".

O'Shea also found a growing sense of entitlement in young people, a "belief that what they want to happen needs to happen because I say so, also because of the ease of social media there is no need to have any dialogue beforehand."

It was wanting "the phone, the freedom, the car and the teacher now".

He was concerned that there was more backing from parents to support the sense of entitlement.

In the school's recent newsletter to families, O'Shea urged parents to remember the school's "high behaviour and discipline expectations", and that parents should reinforce the expectations.

The letter also shared the school's mobile phone policy. It said the school recognised phones were an integral part of the student's social connection, but in class were an unnecessary distraction.

The use of phones is banned during class, phones were taken off students when they broke the rules, for three days or longer depending on how many times the student had been caught out.

O'Shea said even though the school was explicit about the phone rules, he had parents arguing with him over them, and had been physically threatened about them.

He said the worst example of parents backing their children's sense of entitlement was the St Bede's rowing case.

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"It's swung the wrong way. When I first started, parents would just back the teacher and the school irrespective, even if the school got the processes wrong."

He said parents in the past feared speaking up, worried it would mean their child would be picked on by teachers, and he had worked hard to combat these fears.

O'Shea believed this changed for the betterment of everyone and gave students a voice, with parents coming into school talking and working through issues. However, it had shifted too far.

He said while the vast majority of parents were fine and saw the need for the rules and regulations, there was a "growing core of parents who don't believe the school, they believed implicitly what their son says."

When it came to social media and students across New Zealand using it to expound their views, he also wanted schools to have clear, positive expectations and that parents and students understand them.

There was not too much point worrying about boys taking their issues to social media and then ending up on the headlines.

"I think in the end that is the reality and the mouthpiece. I would hope that before going to that point that I was given an opportunity to make it right."

SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEW TOILET WALL

Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology lecturer Dr Donna Swift has researched the relationships between young people and social media. She had also followed the recent cases of students using social media to speak out on school policies.

"Social media is a tool. What drives the tool is the thought process before, now with social media it gets out there so much quicker and it can spread so quickly and get all these people 'liking' and putting their two cents worth in there. Before social media you wrote it on the back of the toilet wall or wrote a letter to the editor and it didn't cover the same area."

She worried social media was creating a culture of complainers.

For a complaint to be valid, it needed to be informed, and an alternative offered, so people can learn and things improve, she said.

People were more flippant with comments on the internet. She said it could lead to people not being as reflective or spending much time trying to understand issues.

Motueka High School board of trustees chair Ian Palmer said the puffer jackets issue his school had dealt with was part of a "proliferation" through New Zealand schools that showed the way students were interacting was changing drastically.

"Technology has made people less personal, it's much easier to hide behind a phone or a computer."

He said schools needed to ensure students were taught interpersonal skills, "to a large extent they are being eroded by society."

He said all the cases were learning opportunities and the puffer jackets outcry showed the school needed to ensure its students knew how the student council worked, as students should go through that when they wanted to enact changes at the school.

He said it was great when students showed initiative, but "there are other ways to do things".

"Kids are thinking of a different way of doing things these days, it tends to be a very individual approach rather than going and talking to people and solving things that way."

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