With more and more teachers on long-term sick due to stress, schools are increasengly being forced to turn to supply teachers. But, as Paul Willis discovers, supply teaching comes with its own pressures.

"Sir, can I go to the toilet?" "No." "Why not?" "You should have gone before the lesson." "But sir, what if I wet myself?" "Don't be silly. Now get on with your work." "Sir, it's your fault if I wet myself." "I can live with that."

It was my first day of supply teaching in a Teesside school and my patience was wearing thin. I had spent much of the morning and a considerable portion of the afternoon shouting myself hoarse at a succession of children who, in a lot of cases, seemed not to be listening.

By now it was the last lesson of the day and my initial enthusiasm to educate had been tempered. Now I was concentrating simply on preventing them from tearing up the room.

Later in the same lesson, a student called me a name I dare not repeat in the pages of a respectable newspaper. I should have been outraged; I should have sent him out. I am sure had it been period one, I would have acted far more decisively - called in his Head of Year, letters to the parents, the full nine yards. But with home time approaching, I had neither the energy nor the will to deal with this 'final insult'.

After a half-hearted attempt to collar the culprit who, in the best traditions of naughty school kids, denied everything, I gave up and escaped to the refuge of the staff room, feeling like I had just broken out of the asylum.

Teaching continues to be a profession - like the medical profession - which virtually the entire nation agrees is hugely important yet hugely undervalued in terms of pay, staffing and conditions.

The Government has tried in some measure to address the pay issue and to deal with the problem of staff shortages. However, the main gripe of teachers at the moment concerns conditions in the classroom. The watchword in education is very definitely discipline.

I chatted to a few members of staff at the end of my first day. They smiled ruefully when I told them this was my first assignment. They asked me how things had gone, but I could tell from the look on their faces they were already anticipating my answer.

"Awful," I replied, perhaps a little too candidly. They did not look surprised. "How can you do this every day?" I asked in amazement.

"It's a difficult job, isn't it?"

While it is exaggerating the problem to portray children as demonic monsters, the issue of discipline is nevertheless a cause for deep concern among both parents and teachers.

At the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers last month, general secretary David Hart warned that middle-class parents are deserting state education and enrolling their children in private schools because of alarm over stories of bad behaviour in the classroom.

Mr Hart's claims are backed by statistics from the independent sector which show new enrolment up 1.7 per cent this academic year, despite a record fees rise of 7.5 per cent.

Mr Hart also admitted parents are increasingly concerned that their children are being taught by a succession of temporary teachers.

My own term of supply lasted four weeks in two different schools in the Middlesbrough area. I have no formal teaching qualification, although, at university, I spent a year working as a teaching assistant in a French school.

However, as more and more teachers take long term leave, such is the need for supply teachers at the moment that graduates with no teaching experience are being drafted in to cover the shortfall. My own limited experience was considered a bonus rather than a requirement for the job.

On my first day I was handed a list of classes for the day, shown to my classroom and left to cope. I began with the sincere hope that maybe I could help these kids learn but, by the end of the day, I was just trying to keep them in the classroom - "crowd control" as one teacher later described the job to me.

Ok, so the behavioural problems were not altogether unexpected. Kids will be kids. I remember from my own school days that lessons with supply teachers were often perceived as an opportunity to do nothing. Trying to comfort myself during the day as my students got more and more out of hand, I recalled one particularly chronic music lesson where a mild-mannered visiting German teacher was subjected to an hour of us hammering away on keyboards while the more moronic elements of the class stood on their chairs humming the Dambuster's theme.

Supply teachers are well paid to deal with these hassles. But even so, in the past, this kind of misbehaviour was always the exception rather than the rule.

In my month of working in schools I saw enough tangible evidence to suggest that the teacher-student relationship is at an all-time low and, in some cases, has irrevocably broken down.

And, although it sounds rather old hat and reactionary to say 'the kids are running wild', nevertheless, in many problem schools, increasingly bad behaviour along with a stronger emphasis on pupil rights have undermined teacher's ability to teach, as well as putting them in a uniquely vulnerable position in the classroom.

Included in the literature from the employment agency I was working for was a list of guidelines on behavioural management in the classroom. Unbelievably, one of the tips advised the teacher in bold type to 'Position yourself for escape' in case a student turns aggressive.

On more than one occasion, I laid my hand on a student's shoulder to get their attention and would find them recoiling away from me in horror and telling me I had no right to touch them. On another occasion, a twelve-year-old Year Eight student threatened to take me to court if I laid my hand on him again.

More than likely most of this talk of litigation is little more than the gamesmanship of the classroom. But whereas the children are perhaps only making these threats to impress their peers, the reality for the teacher is that any kind of physical contact on their part and they risk losing their job.

A teacher at my second school told me about an elderly colleague who had been shoved to the ground trying to make a student move on in the corridor. He had broken both his hips and was forced to retire but, because he had touched the student first when he beckoned him to move on, he was seen as the instigator and therefore no disciplinary action could be taken against the student.

Faced with these kinds of horror stories and all the negative press surrounding pupil misbehaviour, it is easy to fall into the trap of demonising children. Most students, I am sure, would be appalled at a story like the one above. However, sometimes children need protecting from themselves. The irony of recent years is that in our over zealous desire to protect children, we are actually undermining their development. Most children will happily do nothing when the chance presents itself, so when teachers feel compromised in their efforts to control misbehaviour, they are compromised as educators.

I found this out to my disappointment in my brief career of supply teaching. One teacher summed up this frustrating state of affairs when he confided in me that "sometimes you feel like a very expensive baby-sitter".

This sentiment is echoed up and down the country in schools across the state sector. It is no coincidence that at the head teachers' conference in Torquay, the new Schools Minister, David Milliband, received his biggest round of applause when he repeated the Government's plans to crack down on irresponsible parenting and misbehaviour in the classroom.

He told delegates: "Government has a responsibility to teachers, but so do parents and the wider community... when it comes to parents, children or anyone else abusing teachers, this Government is 100 per cent unequivocally on your side."

Teachers in the state sector are still waiting for such rhetoric to be turned into real action.