A US teacher who was critically injured when she was shot by a six-year-old pupil in class in Virginia is showing signs of improvement, authorities said.

The mayor of Newport News said officials are struggling to understand how a child so young could be involved in a school shooting.

Phillip Jones said the condition of the teacher at Richneck Elementary School, a woman in her 30s, is “trending in a positive direction” as she remains in hospital.

The boy shot and wounded the teacher in a first-grade classroom on Friday at the school, according to authorities.

Police outside the school
Authorities said the shooting was not an accident (The Virginian-Pilot via AP)

Police chief Steve Drew said the shooting was not accidental and was part of an altercation. No pupils were injured.

Mr Jones declined to release additional details about what led to the altercation, citing the ongoing police investigation.

He also would not comment on how the boy got access to the gun or who owns the weapon.

“This is a red flag for the country,” Mr Jones said.

“I do think that after this event, there is going to be a nationwide discussion on how these sorts of things can be prevented.”

Experts who study gun violence said the shooting represents an extremely rare occurrence of a young child bringing a gun into school and wounding a teacher.

A mother and child at school
There is a profound sense of shock around the incident, according to officials (The Virginian-Pilot via AP)

Researcher David Riedman, founder of a database that tracks US school shootings dating back to 1970, said: “It’s very rare and it’s not something the legal system is really designed or positioned to deal with.”

He said he was only aware of three other shootings caused by six-year-old pupils in the time period he has studied. Those include the fatal shooting of a fellow student in 2000 in Michigan and shootings that injured other students in 2011 in Texas and 2021 in Mississippi.

Mr Riedman said he only knows of one other instance of a student younger than that causing gunfire at a school, in which a five-year-old brought a gun to a Tennessee school in 2013 and accidentally discharged it.

No-one was injured in that case.

Daniel W Webster, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies gun violence, agreed that a six-year-old shooting a teacher at school is extremely unusual. But he said his research shows that instances of young children accessing loaded guns and shooting themselves or others unintentionally in homes or other settings are rising.

Newport News is a city of about 185,000 people in south-eastern Virginia known for its shipyard, which builds America’s aircraft carriers and other US navy vessels.

Richneck has about 550 students who are in kindergarten through to fifth grade, according to the Virginia Department of Education’s website. School officials have already said that there will be no classes at the school on Monday.

George Parker III, the Newport News schools superintendent, said: “Today our students got a lesson in gun violence, and what guns can do to disrupt, not only an educational environment, but also a family, a community”.

Virginia law does not allow six-year-olds to be tried as adults.