School reports are a waste of time as teachers are no longer honest for fear of upsetting pushy parents, a headmaster has said.

Teachers do not want to risk any potential fall-out with parents who may complain if they feel their child has been unfairly criticised, according to Dr Julian Murphy, headteacher at the £12,000-a-year school Loughborough Amherst School.

He said that school reports now largely consist of “waffle” which serves no purpose at all, as it does not give parents any useful information about their children’s progress.

“When I went to school you would get reports that say ‘so and so is extremely lazy or arrogant’. But now no one says that – it would upset parents,” Dr Murphy told The Daily Telegraph.

“Then when parents say ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a problem?’ teachers say ‘Well, we did’. But they did it too politely.

“It is a cultural change – now parents are more likely to say to teachers: ‘You have upset my child, you have damaged their confidence, the problem isn’t my child, it’s you’.”

Dr Murphy said that while the fear of provoking a bad reaction from parents is apparent among teachers at all types of schools, it can be more acute at private institutions since “we don’t want to lose customers”.