Teach-Secondary-Issue-14.5

IN THE KNOW Martha Evans , director of the Anti-Bullying Alliance, shares her advice on how schools can improve their ability to identify instances of bullying and encourage students to come forward W hat are some of the main ways in which schools can improve their capacity to monitor bullying behaviours, without resorting to surveillance measures? The first thing that helps create monitoring capacity in schools is to have a shared understanding of what bullying is, and what it isn’t. Falling out is an important part of every child’s learning and development, which we have to let themnavigate. In some school communities, however, there may be individuals – or even staff – with very different conceptions of what does and doesn’t constitute bullying. If you haven’t spent time considering what your sense of bullying is, and agreeing on shared meanings together, you’ll soon find that a lot of time will be taken up with helping young people to navigate conflict. Your bullying policy should be as robust as possible, clearly outlining your agreed upon whole school definition of bullying, how it should be reported, what the subsequent processes will involve and so on. There also ought to be anti-bullying training in place for staff, as we still lack any form of mandatory anti-bullying training for teachers, despite the issue affecting one in four children. This could form part of an INSET day or your induction process – just so that staff are clear as to your school’s principles on managing bullying and how to respond to it. When establishing that shared definition of what bullying is, how should schools communicate it to their communities and reinforce it over time? We use an internationally agreed definition of bullying at the Anti-Bullying Alliance which encompasses four elements – repetition , power imbalance , hurt and intent . Posters on walls; enshrining your bullying-related principles and definitions in school policy; ensuring parents knowwhat those are – these can all help the process of weaving a respectful culture throughout the life of your school. Staff should model the behaviour that the school community wants to see in each other, and explore how to go about doing that with students. When we don’t like another person, what’s the best way of dealing with that? How should we seek to manage conflict? These kinds of considerations can prevent things from getting out of control later on. We’d recommend keeping a record of every bullying report you receive, and whether those reports were deemed instances of bullying or not, as that will indicate the degree to which students at your school have developed a sufficient understanding of your shared bullying definitions and principles. How can school staff overcome the psychological barriers that can prevent victims from coming forward? Many schools struggle with this. We’ve found that the most ineffective schools in this area will simply state that they ‘ Don’t have any reported bullying ’ – but then you speak to the pupils, and they’ll say that they don’t bother reporting it, since nothing ever happens when they do. If you’re seeing what appear to be unusually low levels of reporting, find out why that is. A key reason we hear from young people for not reporting bullying is a fear of retaliation, which is why staff responding with some variant of ‘ We’re going to sort it out, it’ll be fine, don’t worry about it, ’ isn’t all that helpful. The young person has no idea what will happen next – in particular, whether the peer they’re reporting will knowwho made the complaint. What can help is to have conversations where the adult effectively says, “ I’m not going to do anything without you – we’re going to work this out together. ” Young people can feel quite embarrassed when talking about bullying incidents, and potentially distrust the responses of adults around them, thus making it vital to involve them as much as possible when they do come and report to you. Another obstacle to active reporting can be a culture in which students accuse each other of ‘being snitches’. What can help here is to recognise that bullying is almost always a group behaviour – it’s relatively rare for just one ‘good “Youngpeople canbevery smart andadept at hiding theirbehaviours” 24 teachwire.net/secondary