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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1103-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
Wednesday 10 May 2006 MR DAVID MOORE, MS MICHELE ELLIOT and MR DENYS ROBINSON MR JOHN D'ABBRO and MS DEBORAH DUNCAN Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 119
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 10 May 2006 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr Douglas Carswell Mr David Chaytor Jeff Ennis Helen Jones Mr Gordon Marsden Stephen Williams ________________ Memoranda submitted by EACH and Ms Michele Elliot
Witnesses: Mr David Moore, Ofsted, Ms Michele Elliot, Director, Kidscape, and MR DENYS ROBINSON, Chair of Trustees, Education Action Challenging Homophobia (EACH), gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Welcome to our witnesses, David Moore, Michele Elliot and Denys Robinson, on this auspicious day. I have just heard from Australia that Britain has won the bid to host the Skills Olympics in 2011. Many of us have been working for that. We have beaten Australia, Paris (France) dropped out, and we have beaten Sweden. It is going to be rather exciting, and so what a good day to have a session of the committee as we cover education and skills. Today we are going to talk about bullying. I will ask David, Michele and Denys if they want to say anything about bullying to get us started, or we can go straight into questions. Ms Elliot: Kidscape has been dealing with this problem since 1984. There are two or three very important matters. The reason people are bullied is because the bully has a problem and the bully looks for something to bully somebody about. We run courses for children who have been severely bullied, 50 per cent of whom have attempted suicide. These children come from nice families; they have not done anything to deserve the bullying; they are usually quite intelligent, gentle and sensitive. There is no one particular way to stamp out bullying but many ways. What we have found has worked and the best way is to have a good head teacher. When the head sets the actual ethos of the school, things go well from there. That has been our experience for the past 21 years. We have a list of excellent schools out there doing fantastic work. I will give you one example where it does not work. A 15‑year‑old girl was stripped to her waist in a school playground, photographs were circulated. She attempted suicide and when the mother, grandmother and father went in to talk to the headmaster, his comment was, and I quote, "It was a bit of horseplay". That is not what we need. Mr Moore: Since Ofsted was established 10 years ago, we have always commented in our reports on issues of bullying. Under the new Section 5 arrangements, while there is no specific requirement for inspectors to comment on bullying within the text, they do have to record a response to a judgment statement that action is being taken to reduce anti-social behaviour, such as bullying and racism. In practice, most inspectors do make a comment on bullying if it is judged to be an issue. Schools are expected in this self-evaluation form to say what strategies and policies they have to improve behaviour. This is pursued by inspectors during the course of the inspections through discussions with staff, interviews taking place with groups of pupils, normally by year group or with the school council, and with ordinary pupils in lessons. One of the questions that is frequently asked, and it is something which has to be asked to all, is: what happens if you are bullied? That way the child starts to tell you what actions they would take if they believed they were being bullied or they believed someone else was being bullied, which then confirms whether in fact the systems at the school are as they say that they are. Under our new arrangements, the inspection regime gives shorter notice. At one time, there used to be parents' meetings and the one question that had to be asked in those parents' meetings was: what happens if your child is bullied? Invariably, some parents would say, "My child was bullied and nothing happened". In those meetings, other parents would say, "That is not true because when it happened to our son/daughter, we contacted the school and this is what happened". One thing one has to recognise where parents are concerned in issues of bullying is that they are extremely upset and angry; they feel powerless to support their child. We give them the opportunity, through a questionnaire, to respond to a whole series of questions. One of those is about their child feeling safe in school and how well they perceive the behaviour in the school to be. Parents then use that form to make comments. Some of them write on the back of the sheet. When the reporting inspector draws the evidence from the questionnaire, all those where there is writing on the back or an additional letter are set aside and an analysis is done. If people raise issues about bullying or behaviour, that is then pursued by the inspectors, again during the course of the inspection, although they cannot comment on specific individual cases. They are looking at the systems to ensure that these things do not happen. In addition to that, we also carry out specific work in terms of reports. I believe that you have been given a copy of our last inspection report, which was Bullying: effective action in secondary schools. That is now two years old. That has led to a number of things being pursued by the Department for Education and Skills, namely the work that they have just put on to the website to look at incidents of racist bullying and how that should be tackled. They have now formed a group, on the basis of part of our report, that is starting to look at the impact of homophobic bullying and what advice can be given to schools to counter that. Mr Robinson: I have been asked to present evidence specifically about homophobic bullying. As our organisation, EACH, provides training and support to teachers and other education professionals, I think we are in a good position to do that. Could I make three, fairly brief points? The first thing I would say is that it is quite important, and we always say this when we provide training in schools, that this is a whole school issue; it is certainly not about political correctness, and it certainly should be seen in the sense of whole school attainment, whether or not each child can fulfil their personal best. If, on a daily basis, you are being insulted and humiliated, having your coursework vandalised or your clothing ruined, or indeed frightened to walk home because you might be set on and beaten up, you are not likely to do well in your SATs, GCSE or A level. In many schools there are enough of such pupils for this to be significantly impacting on the school's exam results, attendance figures and truancy rates. The second point is that what is perhaps unique about homophobic bullying is the degree of isolation of the victims. If you are being bullied because you are black or disabled or ugly, or whatever it may be, your parent knows and is likely to be supportive. Your teachers are likely to be supportive. If you are being picked on because you are thought to be gay or lesbian, it is very likely that you cannot go home and say this. Indeed, many kids that do that find themselves out on the street and homeless within the hour. This is a real fear that many pupils have. It is never particularly clear to them exactly which teacher they might confide in. It is always going to be an extremely difficult business for any professional teacher when suddenly faced with a pupil who wants to come "out" to them. If they have no previous experience of dealing with a gay or lesbian person to their knowledge, then they are in a very difficult situation, but their reaction of course is absolutely critical to the future health of that pupil. I would stress isolation and we have to think about strategies on what might be done about that. In terms of ways forward, our basic rule of thumb would be that we need leadership from the top, and in many ways I absolutely support what Michele Elliot has said about good leadership in schools. I think we also need leadership from central government. We have had that to a very reasonable extent. The DfES has produced very good written guidance which has gone into school that it is revising. However, I have to say that we strongly believe there is no substitute for face-to-face professional in-service training and that Government should be sponsoring this. Likewise, at local authority level, leadership there could make it clear to schools that this is an attainment wellbeing issue that the LEA rates highly. Bristol, for example, has chosen to pay for in-service training to each of its secondary schools. Alternatively, they might organise day conferences with PSAG teachers or pastoral heads. Above all, at school level, governors and head teachers need to make it clear to staff, pupils and parents that homophobic bullying is not acceptable, that difference is to be respected, and that all pupils have a right to be safe at school. Personally, in my own experience as a school teacher, I would say that getting all the pupils together, perhaps in their PSHE sessions, and developing a code of conduct which specifically addresses this issue, amongst many others, is a way of getting a kind of agreed statement which then is a vital point of reference in future when there are incidents, but you need incident-reporting mechanisms and all sorts of things around that. Q2 Chairman: Before we start the questioning generally, can we get some facts? Stephen Williams has been very keen on us having a session on bullying, and he is going to be leading the questioning. One thing that sparked our interest in particular was the evidence from the Children's Commissioner about the priority or the ranking of this concern amongst children that they hold. How endemic, how much of a problem, is it? Can we get it in proportion? How much of a problem is this, David? Mr Moore: Our dilemma, as we reported in our survey, is that there are no kept statistics. What you have are numbers of telephone calls to things like Kidscape or ChildLine. There are recorded incidents of bullying when a child who was perpetrating it has been punished. From the work that Kidscape and ChildLine have done, it is interesting that if you survey children and ask what there fear is, their fear is about bullying. There is a difference between fear of bullying and actual bullying. It is very difficult to determine. To give you an example, one of the ways that girls bully is by using non-verbal communication. A girl walks into a classroom. Other girl she thought were her friends come into the classroom, deliberately walk towards her, but then walk away and sit somewhere else and so they isolate her. The same would happen with boys in terms of homophobic bullying. Nothing is said but that diminishes the youngster in their self-esteem and self-confidence. Denys is quite right; it stops them from participating in learning. It is important that in the schools where bullying is dealt with effectively, head teachers do not perceive that you have to tackle it because it is the socially correct thing to do; they tackle it because it stops children from learning, and they are quite firm about that. It is quite difficult to gauge the scale of it. Mr Robinson: On the homophobic bullying front, DfES's answer in 2002 - and I am afraid all this survey evidence is a bit dated now - was that 82 per cent of teachers interviewed were aware of verbal incidents of homophobic bullying; 26 per cent were aware of physical bullying of that kind. Of 190 lesbian and gay men and women interviewed in the study by Rivers in 2000, 68 per cent of the males reported hitting or kicking that they had received and 31 per cent of the female sample; 72 per cent reported regular absenteeism; and they were "more likely to have left school at 16, despite gaining 6 GCSE at Grade C". Perhaps that gives us a little idea of the scale. Ms Elliot: We have kept several surveys over the years. We did a survey in late 1999 of 1000 adults who had been bullied as children to find out how this affected their lives, and so it was a retrospective survey. They were seven times more likely than the general population to have attempted suicide, et cetera. Our most important surveys are with the children themselves, who do not just express fear of bullying. The surveys that we do ask, "Have you been bullied in the last year and, if so, how?" It varies so much that it is difficult to put a figure on it, but anywhere between 38 per cent and 65 per cent said they had been bullied in the past year. We have been doing this for 20 years and just keeping our records. Therefore, my IT person has developed a way to keep records for schools, a software package that is slightly beyond my technical expertise but does work. It is vital that we have research into what works, that we find out what numbers are being bullied, and that we define it. Otherwise, everyone everywhere has been bullied. Q3 Stephen Williams: Could the three of you briefly comment on how you would define bullying? None of you have said that so far. Perhaps you could split it up into a spectrum from teasing to physical violence or something like that. Ms Elliot: We would define bullying as a sustained, deliberate attack on somebody with the intention of causing pain, and that could be verbal, physical, sexual, racial, whatever you want to call it; it is all bullying when it is deliberate. Teasing is very easy to describe. I can tease you and you can tease me and, if we are enjoying it, that is great. If it is causing pain, then that is bullying. Mr Moore: For inspection purposes, we define it as "aggressive or insulting behaviour by an individual or group, often repeated over a period of time, that intentionally hurts or harms. Research confirms the destructive effects of bullying on young people's lives. Although some can shrug it off, bullying can produce feelings of powerlessness, isolation from others, undermine self-esteem and sometimes convince the victim that they are at fault. It can lead to serious or prolonged distress and long-term damage to social and emotional development". That is the definition to which we work. Mr Robinson: I think that covers it very well. Obviously we are involving here: name‑calling; public ridicule (and could I say that is most damaging when it comes from members of staff, so do not, please, let us assume that homophobic bullying is restricted purely pupil-on-pupil as that is not the case); hitting and kicking; rumour mongering; and social isolation, which particularly seem to be techniques used by girls. Ms Elliot: Except that they are getting more violent. Q4 Stephen Williams: The common definition appears to be: an intention to cause pain. Has the method of bullying changed in any way from Tom Brown's Schooldays, where you got thumped and roasted in front of the fire, to more sophisticated bullying that is harder to detect as Denys has mentioned? For instance, you read about text-message bullying. Has bullying become more sophisticated? Mr Moore: I think there is an issue that as more teachers become aware of the range of types of bullying, it changes its shape, so that the school mechanisms kick in to limit it. It is not about eradication but about limiting the impact of it. Children then find other ways. It is about trying to keep ahead. For example, the advent of mobile phones and youngsters carrying mobile phones has caused a dramatic change in bullying in so far as you were bullied in school and you were bullied on the street, if those schoolchildren saw you on the street, but you can now be in your bedroom, which ought to be a safe place. A text comes up with this foul statement, and that then brings it into your safest location. I suppose. with the advent of more technology, people find other ways. It is interesting that there is a comment, I think in one of the broadsheets, about Friends Reunited, which is an organisation through which you get in touch with people you were with at school. When some people who had been bullied registered their names, they started getting messages from these old bullies. It is quite bizarre. Q5 Chairman: Apologising? Mr Moore: Oh, no, renewing the bullying. Mr Robinson: Of course that IT development is also followed up, and Michele alluded to this, by this very unpleasant practice of subjecting a victim to something very humiliating and filming it using a mobile phone camera and then circulating the photographs. Ms Elliot: Or putting it on the internet. Bullying has changed in a lot of ways over the years. Early research in the Eighties by Dan Olweus in Norway showed that boys were more physical and girls were more verbal. It also shows, from retrospective research of these 1000 adults, what happened to them. What is tending to happen now is that bullying is being reported at a younger and younger age, both by teachers and by parents. Parents ring our helpline, and teachers as well, saying that there is deliberate, sustained nastiness from a 7‑year-old to a 4‑year-old in nursery. We are getting many more reports of weapons. Girls are becoming more physically violent as well as using emotional violence. People are setting up websites about victims and inviting other people to write in to the website so that it is not just that you are not safe with your mobile phone and texting, et cetera; the bullies are very adept at using technology and, as it comes along, they figure out what to do with it. Q6 Stephen Williams: We are primarily concerned here with the welfare of children but, in the evidence that your organisation submitted to this inquiry, it was mentioned that bullying can often be extended into adult life as well. Victims can become victims in their adult life, or the bullies tend to be domineering characters later on in life. It can involve teachers as well. I have come across a case in my constituency of a teacher who was subjected to homophobic abuse and was not well supported by the school. Could you briefly comment on support for teachers who may be bullied, ostracised or ridiculed by pupils within schools? Mr Robinson: I did say originally that it was a whole school issue. Frankly, if a staffroom is not a place where teachers who are gay or lesbian can be comfortable "out" and socially accepted by their colleagues, then it is going to be a fairly similar account for the pupils, one would guess. The leadership does need to be set from the top and the ethos needs to be developed along those grounds. I am afraid those cases that you allude to are not uncommon. Mr Moore: There are four features of good practice that have to be there. You have to have a strong ethos in the school. What does this school stand for and how does it promote tolerance and respect, including respect for difference and diversity? You have to have positive leadership from the senior staff and governors on how bullying is to be dealt with within the overall policy on attitudes and behaviour. That applies to everybody. You cannot have a school that articulates a strong ethos about care and support for pupils when it does not support all adults that work in the institution. It is all part and parcel of the piece. You have to have a very clear statement about bullying, which has input from staff, governors, parents and pupils and which includes examples of how instances of bullying will be handled. The final point is that you have to have a planned approach to the curriculum and tutorial programmes on the issues of bullying in the context which promotes self-esteem and confident relationships. If I can go one step further, it is not just about PSHE being taught in schools; it is about classroom teachers. For example, if a child is name-called and the teacher chooses not to comment, the victim interprets that the teacher is agreeing that the comment was made, and particularly when it comes to slurs against people's sexuality. That does not mean that the teacher then has to challenge the individual who said it and have a huge row. There is a simply a statement that needs to be said: "In this room we do not do that". You are setting the tone. There is a boundary. That is sufficient to support that child. The issue can then be followed up at a later stage. Q7 Chairman: Do teachers in training get that sort of message? Are teachers trained to deal with bullying in their training period? Mr Moore: The training that is offered to teachers is incredibly packed because it is a short period of training. Q8 Chairman: Everyone tells us that. They do not have time to learn about special educational needs. They do not have time to learn about how you teach children to read. What do they have time to do? Mr Moore: I cannot comment in detail on that but steps are being taken to try to do more in terms of their understanding of the nature of managing behaviour. A significant part of their training takes place on the job. If you start in a school that is not good at these things, you will not learn how to do them well. Ms Elliot: In fact, there is one university, which will remain nameless, that I go to every Christmas, because teachers do not want to teach on the last day of class. I speak to the teachers in training. We spend one half of one day speaking about bullying. They are so keen because it is almost impossible to teach anything else if the children that you are teaching are bullies or being bullied because all they are thinking about is "how am I going to bully somebody when I get out of here?" and the child is sitting there thinking, "what is going to happen to me?" It is vital that we do this. Even if you gave them two days, they would be grateful. Q9 Stephen Williams: Chairman, can we come back to your question at the start about measuring the extent of the problem? The impression I gained is that the statistics are patchy and rely either on charities or organisations receiving calls, and that is probably only the tip of the iceberg, or parental surveys that Ofsted mentioned. Do you think that schools, LEAs and the DfES should have a more systemic approach to collecting and understanding this problem? Ms Elliot: I think so. One of the difficulties has been the rather now discredited approaches like No Blame, which, by the way, has surfaced under another name. Many authorities took this up. Part of the actual approach was that you do not keep records; you do not keep any written records of anything that happens. Therefore, you really have no idea how effective you are at stopping something. One of the other problems, going back to something that you were saying about how you can combat bullying, is that if there are no consequences to bullying, children will stop telling and the bullies will just continue to go on. Mr Moore: I would agree with all of that. One of the dilemmas for the Department for Education and Skills is that they do undertake research but it is always short-term research. To get to the heart of these issues, someone has to be prepared to say that they going to undertake a five-year study. Otherwise, you are just dipping in and getting a little snapshot. One could look at a longer term study that can feed back at different points as to the progress that is being made, but it is about someone being prepared to make that commitment to a long-term study. It is interesting that if you look at work that has been done in Australia, New Zealand and the States, people do undertake the longer term studies. Therefore, they feel more confident in articulating a range of strategies that can then follow from that. Q10 Mr Carswell: I was very struck by something that Michele said that if no action is taken and there are no consequences, the problem remains. There is a school in my constituency where there is a big bullying problem and we are now being asked to raise it. I have been given a long lecture about something called restorative justice. Ms Elliot: No blame by another name. Q11 Mr Carswell: Do you think that is effective? That is what triggered the last question. Ms Elliot: I do not have any problem with a whole range of drivers. I do not think there is one method for every school that is going to stop bullying, except the common sense one of the head, and that will stop it. If you do not make a clear judgment and make it clear to the students that this is the line that you do not go over, they will continue to go over it. That is what kids do. All of us who have been parents know that. Restorative justice can work in the right ethos but, if the bullying is continuing, the kids have got the other message that "nothing is going to happen to me". Very briefly, we did a study in two young offenders' institutions. We went in and talked to 95 of these young offenders. It will not surprise you that over 90 per cent of them had been bullies at school. Nobody stopped them. Maybe they would not have been where they were if they had been stopped. Whenever I say this, people tend to think I believe in the "hang them high, discipline, I want to hit kids". No, none of that, and we never hit either one of our sons, luckily because they are 6 feet 3 now. The reality is that discipline has to be there and consequences, and good consequences as well when you behave well. It is very simple. It does not take rocket science to stop bullying. That is what is so frustrating. Q12 Stephen Williams: Are there any differences between the nature of bullying in primary schools and in secondary schools? Also, are there are differences between the ways boys bully and girls bully? Ms Elliot: There are differences. The differences that we have had in the past, as I said briefly earlier about boys bullying boys, tend to be more up-front - wap. In the primary schools, if you get the girls at around age 8 and 9 - and I am sure every female in the room will recognise this - you see, "you are my friend today, you are not my friend tomorrow", that sort of thing, but it is at a much lower level, and it is very easy to stop it at that level. I was a primary school teacher. You change the seating around; you change the lunch rooms around; you assign people to do things; you bring in peer mentoring, et cetera. By the time you get to secondary school, you do not suddenly have full-sprung bullies there. They were the ones who were not stopped in primary school and the victims are the same ones who are going forward with their "oh, I am a victim" mentality. It is more sustained; it is more underground; they are much better at hiding it; and it is much more insidious and more difficult to stamp out. That is one of the reasons we do these courses for children who have been bullied. Our biggest course, and we ran one last week and we will run one on Friday, is offered to kids making that transition stage, the kids from primary school who have been victims and who are going into secondary school still with that mentality, and, believe me, the bullies are there waiting for them. We try to change the mentality before they go there. Q13 Mr Chaytor: Do all bullies know that they are bullies? Ms Elliot: No. Q14 Mr Chaytor: What is best practice in getting the bully to confront the fact that he or she is a bully? Ms Elliot: At an early stage, many of them do not know they are bullies and they are just responding as they would at home and this is what they have got away with. Many of these children, when you point it out to them, will actually stop. Some of the other ones do know that it is a way to have power, that it is what they are successful at, that they are popular because the other kids circle around them and do not want to be part of the victims. Those children are much more difficult to deal with. We have invited them on courses and they just do not come. Mr Robinson: In our area, there is a very peculiar thing that develops from time to time. I have talked to several people who have been through this themselves. They at 14 or 15 and know or suspect that they are turning out gay. They see some other person in the class being picked on for that reason. They join in the bullying in order to cover themselves, and of course later on they are feeling absolutely terrible about that. Q15 Mr Chaytor: In terms of assessing the scale of the problem in schools, earlier you gave us different figures and identified certain ways in which it is reported, but what more needs to be done to get a more accurate picture of the scale of the problem in all our schools, and whose responsibility is that? Mr Moore: There are issues about recording incidents in schools. What tends to happen is that when a case has been proven and someone has been punished, that is recorded. There is an issue about schools logging. Many do that simply by having something called a bully box. Children drop in a letter or a note saying, "I am being bullied" and the school keeps a log of all of those and that is how they work out their scale. Q16 Mr Chaytor: But there is not a standard procedure? Mr Moore: There is not a standard procedure across schools. Q17 Mr Chaytor: Is there a standard procedure for logging incidents of proven bullying or not? Mr Moore: It is difficult to say because sometimes, if violence is used, the child is excluded for violence, not bullying, although bullying is the underlying issue. It tends to be whatever one they record on the form. That obscures some of that bullying. Ms Elliot: The schools tell us that they do not have any clear guidance on doing it. They download our bully incident log from our website. That is by Kidscape and it is not nation‑wide. Q18 Mr Chaytor: So this is an issue for the DfES presumably to look at more effective standardised procedures for recordings? Mr Moore: It would be true to say that the DfES is constantly trying to refine that. One of their difficulties is that they have to be careful that they do not, as it were, impose too many burdens on schools. There is a tension between the requirement not to do that and other measures that could be put in place. Q19 Mr Chaytor: There is a requirement to log incidents. Mr Moore: There ought to be. Q20 Mr Chaytor: What about racist incidents? Is there a requirement to log racist incidents? Mr Moore: Yes. Q21 Mr Chaytor: But not homophobic incidents? Mr Moore: No, there is no requirement at the moment. Mr Robinson: In many ways, a lot of this problem that we have would be solved if the same practice, that is very good practice that is followed on racist incidents, were applied to homophobic incidents, but it is not, I am afraid. In the same way, for example, where schools of course are all required to have an anti-bullying policy in place, only 6 per cent of schools make any kind of specific reference to homophobic bullying. Ms Elliot: And some schools keep no records at all. Q22 Mr Chaytor: On the evidence of the statistics that have been collected, what proportion of all children (a) in primary and (b) in secondary schools are subject to bullying? What is your best estimate of that? Ms Elliot: If you look at everything from the Sheffield research straight through to Dan Olweus, all kinds of research, that can be anywhere from 18 per cent to 38 per cent. Mr Robinson: On a rule of thumb basis, and I can only speak here from personal experience of 30 years a teacher, I would say that in each class you have probably got one or two pupils who are growing up gay or lesbian. Then there will be two, three or four more who do not quite fit in with the general feel of the class; they are perhaps a little sensitive, a little uninterested in sport or whatever, if they are boys, and so they are likely to be victims. If you think of the ones who genuinely are in later life going to turn out to be a gay or lesbian, and total that up for a school of 1000, we are probably talking about 50 or 60 pupils. That is why I say that it can have quite a serious effect on GCSE results and league tables. Q23 Chairman: Is the independent sector better at dealing with bullying than the state sector? Mr Moore: I do not think there is any evidence to say that this. Q24 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask about the new inspection arrangements? Given that we have now got shorter notice, shorter inspections, lighter touch inspections, is that going to reduce the likelihood of identifying bullying as a problem? In the old system, there were more opportunities for the parents and the pupils to report directly to the inspectors their perception of the school. Presumably, those opportunities are less available with the new inspections? Mr Moore: The new inspection regime has only been running two terms, in effect. The way that colleagues are organising those inspections, it is interesting that time is cut out of that inspection time to talk formally to pupils. If you are doing a secondary school inspection, you speak to a representative group in each year and the school counsellor. Time is being made for that. They are still doing that in primary schools because they see that as an important way of validating what the school is saying. As you have said, we do not have the parents' meeting. I would be surprised if Ofsted were to want to curtail that. If issues are flagged up, even when we are looking towards proportional inspections that they offer for schools deemed to be already outstanding, someone is going in for a day and they would still want to check against the issues around children's safety because there is the "every child matters" agenda. You have to be confident and the school has to be able to evidence what it is they do. That is what you then look at when you start to question them on it. Q25 Mr Chaytor: In assessing children's safety and general wellbeing, what specific criteria are used within the new inspection framework? Is there one that specifically refers to bullying? Mr Moore: Yes, because you have to ask if the school complies with the requirements of "every child matters" and there is the issue about child safety. Bullying automatically comes into that. Q26 Mr Chaytor: Is it a specific criterion on which the school is assessed? Mr Moore: Yes, we have to form a judgment, as I said at the beginning. There is a form on which you have to make a judgment. It says, "What is the school's strategy? Is that strategy effective for dealing with things like bullying and racial harassment?" Q27 Mr Chaytor: Finally, can I ask about training because there was some comment earlier about the paucity, in training teachers, of identifying the symptoms of bullying. Equally, if the consensus is that it all stems from the head teacher, it should be an easier problem to resolve by ensuring that all head teachers are effectively trained as part of their professional development. What is there for head teachers? Is it systematic or is it arbitrary? Mr Moore: I believe those sorts of issues are covered in the National School Leadership Programmes. Local authorities lay on very good training and they bring in people from a range of expertise across the country. We know from one of the authorities we inspected that there is a direct correlation between incidents of bullying being reported by parents from particular schools and those schools never going to that in-service training, and there is nothing that anybody can do. Because schools have a high degree of autonomy, if they choose not to participate, then technically there is nothing that can be done. I suppose those letters could be passed on from the local authority to an organisation like ours. Complaints go to the DfES. They could come to us and we could then look at the inspection regime and whether that school should be brought forward for inspection. Q28 Helen Jones: Is there any detailed research that tells us why children bully and which children are the most likely to start bullying others in school? We hear a lot of anecdotal evidence but how much real, detailed research is there in this area? Ms Elliot: The research has been done mainly by Dan Olweus in Norway. You have heard me mention his name. He is the guru. It is very specific research. Basically it says that these are children who come from homes where there is inconsistent discipline. Some of his research shows children who are particularly hyperactive. There is a whole list, and I will give that to you rather than go through the whole thing. He then studied these children and followed them for 40 years. The results were really fascinating because they were four times more likely to end up in prison than the regular population, and a whole range of other things. In addition to children coming from homes were bullying is basically fostered, we found a whole other group of bullies who come from homes where they are so indulged that they go to school and they are little gods and they think that everything revolves around them. We call them the brat bullies basically, but we do not have research to say how many and which they are. His research, as far as I know, is the only long-term research being done on the bullies themselves. Q29 Helen Jones: What about those who become victims of bullying? Again, we hear anecdotal evidence about people getting themselves into a victim mentality. Equally, on occasions an outsider might wonder why on earth someone has been picked on to be bullied? Do we have any evidence about the victims of bullying, why they are targeted, what happens to them when they are targeted, and how that affects their learning, their later life, and so on? Mr Robinson: I have referred to a number of studies by academics and by the DfES. Those are a bit out of date now. I would urge DfES, and perhaps the Department for Health as well, to spend some money on carrying out much more thorough research. I think this would be a reasonable task for government, frankly. Mr Moore: You might want, at some point, to have a discussion with those organisations that support, for example, women who have been victims in terms of abuse by their partners. I suspect there is a high correlation between what happened to them when they were at school and the mental state that it got them into and them then becoming caught up in that. There is an important difference about one of the underlying causes of boys bullying and girls bullying. Girls tend to talk about themselves more than boys. Boys operate at quite a superficial level and talk about football and all sorts of other things. They do not make big disclosures. The difficulty is that the more that you disclose about yourself, the more ammunition people have to harm you. That is an important difference that underlies some of the girls' bullying. You can track that by looking at older people. You have to look at older people and track back. Mr Robinson: Without wishing to be crass, it is possible that boys who are growing up gay tend to reveal more about their inner selves than straight boys do. There is something about the whole way in our culture that boys perceive themselves to be men. If you have this terrible pressure that there is now for boys to be macho, to be tough, not to show their feelings, to treat girls as sex objects, to be harsh and rough and all the rest of that, then obviously somebody who does not fit those parameters, whether they are gay or not, is likely to be at risk. Q30 Helen Jones: Denys, is there a difference, in your experience, between those who bully people who are gay or lesbian, or perhaps bully them on racist grounds, and what you might call the more generalised bullying: "I bully someone because I do not like the way she looks or dresses", or whatever? Is there a difference or can you trace the same pattern in those that carry out that kind of bullying? Mr Robinson: The people who are likely to take it up and do something about it are probably the same types all around but, that said, they are probably more likely to have grown up in homes where casual vile comments about gay or lesbian people are tossed around and not challenged and thought to be great. They import that into school and cannot see any reason why they are being challenged - "Doesn't everybody think gay people are contemptible? What's the problem?" Ms Elliot: We are keeping records. We are dealing with children who are victims of bullying. Going back to your question of what makes a victim, we have been keeping pre-imposed questionnaires that have been independently evaluated. I will leave this with you. It is about working with victims. It is the very severe end that we are dealing with and so I cannot tell you what makes a victim except that the bully is looking for a victim. Q31 Helen Jones: That would be interesting. Denys, you said in your evidence that 94 per cent of British schools do not have policies that address homophobic bullying. Why is that, do you think, and what would such policies look like? You referred earlier to the fact that you need a whole school approach to bullying in general. What changes would you like to see addressed on that particular issue? Mr Robinson: The critical thing, surely, is that the school has agreed. As I say, it is so much stronger if all the pupils have been actively engaged in discussing this stuff in their groups and have come up with a conclusion themselves, rather than it just being decided by the head and governors and handed down. There needs to be an explicit statement that this school will not tolerate homophobic bullying. It needs to be spelt out somewhere so that it is a point of reference. Q32 Chairman: We do not want to get to the stage where there is a good code against homophobic bullying and racist bullying but not other for bullying. That has to be clearly examined. Mr Robinson: I entirely agree with that. Could I back-track to a question that Helen Jones made? I am not trying to make a political point here exactly but the baleful influence of Section 28 for very many years from 1988 gave many schools and head teachers, some of whom frankly are homophobic, the excuse to hide behind that legislation by falsely claiming that it prevented them from teaching about homophobia, or indeed even taking effective action about homophobic bullying. Now that that has gone, we have a battle to make people realise that it has gone. It is surprising how many people will still say, "Oh, we cannot touch that; it is Section 28". Q33 Jeff Ennis: The Children's Commissioner, earlier on this year, suggested that we ought to be thinking in terms of having an annual survey on bullying in order to get a better monitoring system off the ground. Do you all agree with that suggestion? Ms Elliot: I agree, as long as it does not interfere with actually doing practical work. One of the problems in all of these types of issues is that the Government throws money at "let's have a survey, let's have anti-bullying week, let's do this", and it becomes window-dressing. "Let's tell the children to tell": fine, we told all the children to tell and then what happened? Not a lot. A survey is fine as long as there is a practical outcome to it and so that the kids are actually helped. Q34 Jeff Ennis: We have looked at the different aspects of what bullies are. Can bullying be class-based? Does it cover all social classes? Are there any features that working class bullies might have over middle class bullies? Mr Moore: It cuts across all groups, but one form of bullying that does exist is around differences between socio-economic groups in the same school. If you have highly motivated pupils and an under-culture of disengagement, that group then bullies those children. They use words like "swat" and the rest, but it pulls down a group that is motivated. It is about how a school tackles that bottom-end culture. That is why that policy is so important and the expectations of the schools are clearly articulated to the children. Mr Robinson: Swats very quickly become poofs. Q35 Jeff Ennis: Are the legal duties on schools centred around bullying strong enough or do we need to beef them up? Mr Moore: There is a point when bullying starts to become a criminal offence if you are over a certain age because it involves intimidation and threatening behaviour. There is a raft of laws already around dealing with certain types of behaviour that a school could employ. What may inhibit them is the fear of criminalising a child. At the end of the day, and both my colleagues have said this, if the school does not make it clear what the consequences are or could be, because schools have the power to exclude a child if they believe their behaviour is unacceptable, there is another set of laws that the children need to be aware of: if you do this, then somebody can bring a civil action or a criminal action against you, and you need to understand that. It is about schools being up-front and saying that to the young people and to their parents so that when the parent says, "I refer to this, that and the other", you then say, "You may well do in your own home but in this community this is the way that things are. It is not negotiable". The good schools that we have inspected took that line: it is not negotiable and this is unacceptable. Q36 Jeff Ennis: How can we make it easier for children who have been bullied to tell an adult and open the process? Mr Robinson: I refer to one suggestion in my written evidence, which we came across and I have not been able to track down in detail. We were told that there is a system running in certain schools in parts of Germany where the pupil body elects teachers of trust, so-called, who then, under German law, have the legal ability to receive confidential information which they are not then obliged to pass on. They almost have a sort of priest function, I suppose, in a sort of way. In many ways, it would be helpful in every school for there to be people like that who are not head teachers or LEA appointed, because it is coming from the grass roots up. Ms Elliot: On the first assembly you make it clear to the entire school that this is a school that does not tolerate bullying. You put in pupil helpers, call them what you will, peer mentors, and do not give them too much responsibility because I worry about that a lot. Put up things like bully boxes but do not call them bully boxes; call them suggestion boxes, and a child can put something in if he thinks he is getting too much homework. Then a kid walking by putting something in is not thought just to be a child who is reporting. Several of the schools that I visited in Norway, granted they were the smaller schools, had a brilliant system because each child needed to have a bus pass or a lunch voucher and, to get that, they went to a particular teacher. During that time, which was once a week or once a month, the child actually saw the teacher and could tell the teacher things that they would not otherwise tell. Our experience with the victims of bullying is that the older they get, the more rarely they tell. They certainly do not want to distress their parents, or the teachers for that matter. Mr Moore: Our evidence tells us that a significant number of schools now have peer mentors or buddies, as they are called, who receive proper training; they have drop-in centres and pupils use those. They also turn to learning mentors. One of the questions we ask is: if you were being bullied, where would you go? Invariably, children will name a member of staff, be that a teacher or an adult, and say that if they were concerned, they would start with them. Quite often they will make the disclosure to that member of staff but not want it to be taken any further. That member of staff then is stuck in a position until they can talk the child round into taking it further, because they recognise that they need to be working with the child. There are quite a lot of systems already in place. Q37 Jeff Ennis: What specific anti-bullying programmes or approaches do you think are the best and work most effectively? Ms Elliot: I am prejudiced, obviously. I think the systems that work the best are the ones that involve the parents and the children; that put down specific suggestions about what will happen; that get the kids involved in making up contracts, and following through. Again, it is not a magic thing; it is such common sense. It is good teaching. It is good parenting, basically. We have followed schools that put in things like bully ports, for example: where the children themselves come up with ideas about what should happen. It sounds draconian. They have not set up voodoo dolls yet, but who knows what they will do in the future? Maybe bear traps in the playground! But we do find that they actually work, if you just make it up front that, "This school will not tolerate bullying", and on you go. Then any kind of system can work. You can do anything in that. Mr Robinson: I would absolutely support all of that and so I will not go over it again. However, I would make one final point. The vital thing in our area is in-service training, or indeed initial teaching training, the TDA. The problem is, because the Government has, very rightly, devolved an awful lot of financial management to schools, headteachers are in charge of the in-service training budget. We therefore have a reverse situation going on. If the school is aware that homophobia is a problem, or are willing to acknowledge it, it might just be willing to include in-service training on this problem in its programme. If the school is denying that they have a problem, or indeed the head is homophobic to start with, the last thing they will do is spend part of their precious budget on getting in‑service training about how to deal with gay and lesbian pupils, or people who are thought to be so. So you do actually need either government sponsorship to pay so that the training is free, or LEA likewise. Otherwise, you have a perverse incentive going on. Q38 Chairman: Where did the no-blame thing come from? You seem to agree that it did not work and does not work, but where did it come from? Ms Elliot: It originally came from Sweden, from Anatole Pikas who is a researcher at the University of Uppsala. It was brought into this country by George Robinson and Barbara Maines. It was bastardised - that is the best word I can use - to the point that it became totally ineffective. There are seven steps, which include the victim telling or writing down what has happened; the teacher then taking that to the bully; setting up a group of bullies, with other people involved to decide what to do; not keeping any records. These are the seven steps, trusting to the children that it will happen and going back and saying, "Did it happen?". What we found - and I have brought this and will leave it with you - 20, 30 or 40 letters from the kids and the parents that this has actually happened to. What does happen is that the child says, "I'm not going to tell again because you have just told the bully everything about me; so they know exactly what to do". It has come back, by the way, and it has been around as the "support group method" or the "seven-step solution". Q39 Chairman: There is a bit of snake oil, in your view! Mr Moore: There is one final point, to do with the in-service training of staff and the initial teacher training. Government has control over initial teacher training. We can therefore suggest that newly qualified teachers have such-and-such experience. The issue is around the existing staff in schools. Denys is quite right. The responsibility for their in‑service training is the headteacher's. So the issue is about what sorts of discussions need to take place with headteachers to ensure that those issues become part of ongoing training for staff in managing children. Q40 Chairman: David, everything you have said is absolutely sweet reason, but why is not Ofsted doing more about it? You recognise the problem. It is not reported. You do not seem to have encouraged more than six per cent of schools to keep a register, so we do not really know the stats. Surely Ofsted should be much more active in this than you have been? Mr Moore: I think that Ofsted is very active in it, but we do not make policy; we merely report back to the Department. Q41 Chairman: Come, on David! You go into schools; part of your job is to assess the overall culture and effectiveness of the education in that school. If loads of kids are not learning because they are being bullied, or even because they are bullying, surely that is an Ofsted responsibility? Everything you have said has been first-class. I have to say that I have been very impressed by what you have said, but it does not seem to reflect what Ofsted is doing on the ground. Mr Moore: I think it is what Ofsted is doing on the ground. Q42 Chairman: Why is it only six per cent of schools? You go in; the school does not have a policy on bullying; schools do not have a proper system of reporting. Why are only six per cent doing it, if Ofsted is doing its job? Mr Moore: They are figures that are given that people say have been said. It is not hard evidence. Chairman: It leaves me with a feeling that Ofsted could do a lot better. Wind up, Stephen. Q43 Stephen Williams: I will wind up briefly. What single thing could the DfES do to improve this situation - from each of the three of you? Is it to do with collecting statistics? Is it a particular policy a school needs to have in place, or what? Mr Moore: The one thing they could do would need the support of people like yourselves: that headteachers have to ensure that there is proper training for their teachers, and not just leave it all the time to initial teacher training to try and resolve that problem, in the short space of time they have. It is an ongoing issue and it has to be regular, updated training of people. Ms Elliot: I think the one thing that schools could do would be to ensure that, say, every pupil had something - and this is actually done by one of your MPs, Dan Norris ---- Q44 Chairman: A very good MP, if I may say so. Ms Elliot: Yes, and I agree. Q45 Chairman: Universally admired! Ms Elliot: He is going to absolutely love that! Q46 Chairman: He is sitting behind you. Ms Elliot: Is he? No, he is not! This is just an example. It was done in his constituency, locally. Argos is now going to pay for this to go across the entire country. That is good practice. The same with this, which is a DVD that we developed. It is now going to every secondary school in the country, to give them exactly what they can do. Not a method. Here is a smorgasbord of things that work. Kidscape, which is tiny, had to go out and find the money to send this out. I have only ten members of staff. It would have been very nice for the DfES to send this out free to every school, and to every primary school. We have just raised the money to do a DVD for primary schools. So the reality is practical things. Let us do things that actually get to the children, so that we do not keep getting the calls from these distressed parents, saying, "My kid has attempted suicide, aged nine, because they're being bullied". Mr Robinson: High-quality in-service training, paid for from the top, either by the DfES itself or by the local education authority. There is really no substitute. Q47 Chairman: Thank you very much. That was an excellent session. We learnt a lot. I am sorry if I was being bit hard on you there, David. Mr Moore: That is all right. I am used to it. Chairman: We have to be hard on Ofsted. Again, thank you very much. We have learnt a lot, and we are now going to talk to some heads about bullying. Witnesses: Mr John D'Abbro, Headteacher, New Rush Hall School, Redbridge, and Mrs Deborah Duncan, Headteacher, Horbury School, Wakefield, gave evidence. Q48 Chairman: Can I welcome you, John D'Abbro and Deborah Duncan, to our proceedings. I know that you have heard some of the evidence we have just taken. We now want to drill down with the two of you, who have a particularly interesting professional experience of this problem. As with the last three witnesses, we gave them a chance for an introductory comment. We have your CV and your background, but is there anything you would like to say to start us off? Deborah, it is particularly nice to see someone from Yorkshire and who is not from Barnsley! John, it is very good to have you here too. Who would like to start? Deborah? Mrs Duncan: I will start. I think that you have seen my CV. I have been in post for just one year as a headteacher. Previously I was a deputy head in Bradford. So I am still getting a feel for the school; what policies they have; as you have just been talking about, what systems are in place; and having to make sure that the systems that are not in place are put right. In terms of bullying, in fact last week we had an anti-bullying week, where we reinforced all our policies with the students. So it is quite fresh in my mind and, when I answer your questions today, hopefully that will be reflected. Mr D'Abbro: In terms of the comments I can make, I cannot reflect on what happens in mainstream schools because I work in the segregated sector of special education; but in the particular field of special education where I work, which is with children with behaviour, emotional and social difficulties, we have a microcosm of society within there. I have to say from the beginning that I can only give you a perspective from special education, although I think it is germane to and has inroads into the mainstream schools as well. Q49 Chairman: Tell us a bit more about your special school. How did it come about? How big is it, and so on? Mr D'Abbro: It is a group known as the New Rush Hall Group and it consists of an all-age specialist school for children with behaviour, emotional and social difficulties; three pupil referral units; an adolescent psychiatric unit; a behaviour outreach support team; and we are currently in negotiation with our Children's Trust and LA, to pick up an early years provision. I am really, for want of a better word, an executive head. I still teach a bit. Although I am not sure the children would say that I teach very well, but I still do teach a little bit. I think that is important. Q50 Chairman: How many pupils? Mr D'Abbro: Right across the whole services, we work with about 400 children. Within the day school, that is funded for 72 children, all-age - so from as young as five up to 16. Q51 Chairman: And they all come from one local authority area? Mr D'Abbro: No. We are the London Borough of Redbridge, but we do take out-of‑borough children. Q52 Chairman: The proportion of those, in and out? Mr D'Abbro: About 20 per cent. There are issues there about other authorities referring children to that, taking up Redbridge places as it were. But I will not get into the politics of that today. Q53 Stephen Williams: How big was the problem in your particular school? Perhaps Deborah would be best placed to start off with this. I understand that you are new in post, but have you got the impression that bullying is a significant problem in your school? Mrs Duncan: I think that it is a problem in any school, and any head who denies that they have got bullying is deluding themselves. That is the first thing I would start with. Secondly, you have been talking about systems this morning and I have brought in a system called "positive discipline" this year, which has been working. As part of that, we record all bullying incidents. Before I came here today I got a print-off of all the bullying incidents that have happened in this last year. We have had 39 cases of recorded bullying since September and we have 1,055 children. What you might then say is that not all cases of bullying have been reported and recorded. These are all cases where we have actually punished the child as a result of someone being bullied; but often, as you know, there are cases of bullying where it is best just to discuss with the two parties; you talk it through with the children, and you do not actually punish them; so then it is not necessarily recorded. However, every time it is reported we are recording it on our system. Going back to the earlier discussion, I think that it would be good thing to have a formal requirement for schools to report the number of bullying incidents. We have to do it for racial incidents. I have a special form I have to fill in for racist ones, but not for homophobia or any other sorts of bullying. I do not see that that would be a burden on us particularly, because we are already doing it as a school. Q54 Stephen Williams: That was a remarkably candid response, particularly as the press are here and statistics on your bullying may well end up in your local paper. Mrs Duncan: I do not think that is a high number. I do not think that is a high number at all. What I do personally as the headteacher is, if there is an incident of bullying and it is not resolved.... If there is just one incident of bullying, often it can just be resolved by a punishment or a discussion. If it becomes a recurring incident, I always see the parents personally, because I take bullying very seriously. I am a parent and I think, "What would I feel like if it was happening to my child?". I always try to make myself think that, and then it makes you more sympathetic. So I always see the parents, and then we work out strategies how we are going to tackle it. Punishing it is not always the strategy, because it can make it worse. Q55 Stephen Williams: We heard in the earlier session that only six per cent of schools have a specific acknowledgement or a policy to deal with homophobic bullying. Does your school? If it does, what is actually in that policy? Mrs Duncan: I have it here. When you were talking about homophobia, I did check and we do have the word "homophobia" in there. Racism, sexism, homophobia are given as examples of bullying. We review this bullying policy every year with the governors, and then we reintroduce it to the staff and children. For example, last week was our anti-bullying week. All the children when they come into school also get this booklet, which is called Blot it Out. It is our anti-bullying booklet, and they all get one in Year 7 when they come in. Then, once a year, we have a week when we focus on it for the week, just to remind them. This has activities which they do in their tutor periods, and in personal and social education, where they do little activities about role playing: "What if this happened? What would you do?". In it, it says very clearly across the front, "Horbury School is a telling school" - to encourage them to always tell. In terms of what I found when I got to Horbury, these policies were all in place. I just wanted to refresh all the students' and staff's memories about them. There is a danger that when the children come in Year 7 it is a big thing and you focus on it and then, as they move through to the older years, you do not discuss it any more; and then they are less likely to tell. Q56 Jeff Ennis: Continuing on the theme of keeping proper records, why is it do you think, Deborah, that many schools do not keep proper records at the present time? What is the reasoning behind it, do you think? Mrs Duncan: You could argue that it is because they do not have to do it mandatorily. Often, if you do not tell somebody to do something, require them to do something, they do not do it. Of course, schools are very busy places and we have all sorts of pressures on us to do a variety of other things. Just last term we had to fill in the self-evaluation form; we had to restructure the entire staffing of the school. It is just another thing to do. But if you already have proper systems in place, it is not a difficult thing to do. I think that they do not do it just because they are not required to do it. Q57 Jeff Ennis: It is not going to be a big step to require headteachers to do it, because there is already a procedure set down from the anti-racist issues. Mrs Duncan: It is good practice. If I were a parent going to look round a school and it was not doing that, then I would have questions to ask. Q58 Jeff Ennis: Do you think schools, and in particular senior management teams, ought to be more proactive in trying to detect incidents of bullying in school, rather than depending on the pupils to come forward to a particular teacher, to the headteacher, or whatever? Do we need to be more proactive? Mrs Duncan: You can be proactive in the sorts of things that you deliver, in the way that you educate children how to deal with it. Often, for me, when a child is being bullied, sometimes they are being bullied because of some of the actions they are taking. I have one child in particular in my school who very much tells tales on other children very openly, in front of them; so then she gets bullied. We have been working with her. I have a behaviour mentor who works for me, who is not a teacher; who is there, available, all day. Children tend to go to her, and she teaches them strategies how to avoid being bullied. That is a really obvious one, but sometimes you can teach children how to avoid that sort of thing. So she does work with them. When we know that somebody has been bullied, we work with them; but we do not actually go out looking for examples of bullying - not really. If it comes up, then we deal with it; but we try to educate to prevent. Preventative education is the best, I think. Q59 Jeff Ennis: I am wondering, from John's perspective, working with EBD children, et cetera, how many of your pupils would you say have been victims of bullying? Would it be higher than the normal school setting? Mr D'Abbro: Yes, and unfortunately many of them have been bullies. It is getting back to the point - understanding the reason why they are bullies. Can I just pick up something that Deborah said? All the things that Deborah said as good practice I would suggest are good practice in any school. What is good practice in a special school, an independent school - dare I say that? - a large secondary school, or a primary school, is good practice. There is one thing I would want to take away from that - and I was mindful, Chair, when you mentioned Australia, of the great Australian educator Bill Rogers' line - is that it is the certainty of the consequence that is more important than the severity. As a parent, what was really important for me when my children were growing up was that they knew that if I said X was X, then X was X, and it was not going to be A or B. It is the same in schools. If children know that if they do something wrong there will always be a consequence and it is always followed through, that will establish the ethos in a school around lots of things; but I would particularly say in relation to behaviour management. It is the point Michele made. Children will test boundaries. That is part of what being a child is about. You have to learn what is right and what is not right. That is where teachers, by being role models, must set examples and always challenge children when they get it wrong. I am not talking about hanging and flogging children; it is about saying, "That's the line, and if you step over that line there will be a consequence". I am not suggesting that children should be frightened, but they should be absolutely clear that there is a consequence for every action, because all of us have to take responsibility for our actions. I just wanted to endorse that bit. In the context of the children I work with - and I was thinking about this when you invited me to come - is there a correlation that looks at why children bully? I think it is about relationships. The most important thing in my world is the relationships I have with the people I love and care for, and hopefully they think the same way back. In my experience, in 25 years of working outside the mainstream, I think that it is a society-based problem, not a school-based problem. It is about children who are unable to make relationships. Because they are unable to make relationships, they use other forces, i.e. they are physically bigger; they are intellectually more able to intimidate people. They bully people so that they can feel good about themselves, by making other people feel bad about themselves. I have no evidence to back that up but I just have an instinct that, given how important I think relationships are in our culture, in our world, if you cannot make relationships then you have to use more covert ways of doing it. I think that may be something that causes people to become bullies. Equally, the other side of it is why do some people become victims? That is learned. As a parent, I think, "Have I got my bit wrong?" but ---- Q60 Chairman: You are both saying the same thing really, because Deborah is saying - did you call her, or him, a "relationship counsellor"? Mrs Duncan: She is a behaviour monitor, but she does all sorts. She works with all the vulnerable youngsters. She is there and they know she is there, and they can go to her at any time. Q61 Chairman: That is the other side. What about tackling the inability to build a relationship that John has put his finger on? Mrs Duncan: She can do that sort of thing as well. Q62 Chairman: She can do that as well? Mrs Duncan: Yes, she is a trained counsellor and she uses all sorts of mechanisms. I look at this list that I have of people who have been bullies during this year, and they are for a variety of reasons, as was mentioned earlier. For example, some are bullies because their parents are bullies. I see that when they come in and challenge me, if I discipline their child. They try to bully me, and shout and swear at me, and so on. I have had a couple of cases of that just this week actually. Often they are learning that bullying behaviour at home; or sometimes, like you say, it is because nobody loves them at home and so they are seeking to get attention and love at school, and they do it in that way. There are different reasons for it. Q63 Jeff Ennis: I guess that the person you have in the school that the kids can go to would be very much along the same lines as the German model - a teacher to trust, as it were - mentioned in the previous session. It is a similar principle, I guess. Mrs Duncan: Yes, it is a similar principle, but we have a confidentiality policy. The children are clear that sometimes she will have to take it further and tell. She is our child protection officer as well. So every week, on a Tuesday morning, she comes to see me and she tells me any significant things that are going on, to keep me briefed - which is also important. Q64 Jeff Ennis: Do you think that sort of formal structure would have more impact on the bullying situations in school? Mrs Duncan: I think so, because it is sometimes an issue in large schools that children do not know who to go to and do not know who they can trust. It is having clear people who are marked out as, "These are the people you can go to if you are being bullied". Going back to the teacher training, that is important. I think it is happening with initial teacher training now, because the ones I am getting through on interview are very clued up on it. I asked a safeguarding question last Friday on interview: "How can we safeguard the safety of our children in schools?". They were very clued up on child protection, bullying, all that sort of thing. I think that the other speaker was right: the established teachers may sometimes need to be reminded, and we have to do that with in-house training. Q65 Jeff Ennis: Do you think that the development of Children's Trusts and that sort of situation within the Every Child Matters agenda, and all of that, will impact positively upon bullying in schools? Mrs Duncan: I do and, going back to my point that if you make schools do it they will do it, we now have a responsibility with the Every Child Matters agenda, and Ofsted are looking at "How are you tackling safe, secure and healthy?". In our school self-evaluation form you have to say, "What are you doing to make sure that every child is safe in school?". Q66 Jeff Ennis: Does the DfES give a consistent message on bullying or could it offer more support to schools, do you think? Mrs Duncan: It is not consistent, I think - because we are both pausing. We know where to go to look for advice and help on bullying. We know about Kidscape; we know about some of the websites. Again, I do not think it is as strong a message as we have had on, say, racism. Q67 Chairman: What about my criticism of Ofsted? It seemed to me that you have good evidence but, if there are only six per cent.... He has gone. Mrs Duncan: He has not! Q68 Chairman: Oh, dear! But do you think Ofsted could do more? Mrs Duncan: I will defend David slightly, in that, under the new arrangements for inspection and in the self-evaluation form, there is a whole section where you have to talk about children's safety, security, personal well-being and emotional well-being. So they are doing it indirectly through that particular section. Q69 Chairman: We have let him off the hook! Mrs Duncan: Which is rare! Q70 Chairman: John? Mr D'Abbro: It is rare for a headteacher to defend Ofsted. Yes, I would have to defend David. We need to understand - and I am coming at this from a special school perspective - that children learn behaviour from adults. We have to look at where does this problem fit vis‑à-vis society and school. Schools are such a socialisation agent. I do not want to get into the macro politics of that, but basically we get the sort of children we have always wanted, because we put certain procedures and certain systems in place. In my experience, most children learn their bullying habits from their parents or carers. I would hate to believe that, within the workforce that I manage, we have got bullying within the staff; but, if we did, it would follow that staff would bully pupils, and pupils would bully pupils. We can look at Ofsted and say, "Is Ofsted doing it?" or "Is the DfES doing it?"; but it is actually an endemic problem within society, in the same way as we now have legislation that safeguards the rights of minority groups. We need to look at that in relation to bullying. It is Deborah's point: if we made schools do it, I think that it would have more impact than it does currently. Q71 Mr Carswell: In terms of tackling bullying, I am concerned about something I have heard about called restorative justice. There is a school in my constituency where it is used as a tool. Do you think that it is part of the problem or the solution? Is it something that you would use in your school, or would you be wary of it? My fear is that it means that people can do things and not face consequences. Do you share that concern? Mrs Duncan: I went to a conference in London recently about behaviour management strategies and I was speaking about positive discipline, which is one I have used in my school. Going back to what John was saying, the system I have is a pyramid and it says very clearly, "If you do this, this will happen". The next stage is, "If you do this, this will happen". So every child in the school knows exactly what will happen. I think that is really important. Having to follow through on those this year in my school has been quite difficult, because I have gone into a school where that has not been the case. There has been a lot of talking about what you have done and being sorry for it, but not being punished for it. I very much believe that you do need to punish bullies. Otherwise, they will carry on doing it. At the same time, however, I have colleagues in the Association of School and College Leaders who have tried restorative justice. I think that it is good practice to discuss things and be open about them, but only if the victim wants to be involved in that. As we heard earlier, if the victim is then presented in front of the bullies, it can make them feel even more vulnerable. So if it comes from the victim and they want to do it, then it can be good. I would never discourage activities where children discuss, in circle time or tutor time, if somebody has done something wrong and they are sorry. I think that you can have a combination in a school, but I very much believe that, if people bully and do it persistently, they need to be punished for it. That is what I am doing; but I am getting a hard time from some parents about it, because I am seen to be too strict. Q72 Helen Jones: We talk about the learned behaviour of children. I wondered if we could talk a little about methods for encouraging good behaviour and how you feel that impacts on bullies. I always feel that when we are discussing a problem like that we are in danger of missing the fact that many of our children do behave well. I can remember my own experience of teaching, where we had, for instance, a number of children with disabilities. I was very impressed by the way the young people looked after them, sought to include them in everything, and it was a positive relationship on both sides. What sort of a role do you think having strategies for encouraging good behaviour has in tackling bullying, and in rewarding good behaviour? Mr D'Abbro: I think that you have to catch children being good. The big problem with schools is that often we catch children being inappropriate. I would like to think that, within the service areas that I manage, we actually have systems in place that catch children getting it right, so that children learn that they get praise for getting it right rather than being highlighted because they get it wrong. That is not to say you do not have the systems in place to challenge children when they get it wrong. I would contend that the single most important thing in the work that we do is the quality of relationship between the adult and the child. Within the context of the quality of the relationship, if you have effective and positive relationships that is the tool that you will use to effect change and challenge children when their behaviour is inappropriate. If you are saying do we use enough opportunities to role model - to show children the right way of sorting out issues - then I think that in effect, in practice, yes, you should do. You challenge children when they get it wrong and you have procedures, but what underpins that is the quality of relationship and the quality of care between the teacher, the facilitator of learning, and the student, the pupil. Q73 Helen Jones: Deborah, you said you had a positive discipline strategy. Does that include positive rewards, and so on? Mrs Duncan: Yes, we have a pyramid of rewards as well. Q74 Helen Jones: I have had a local school that did that very successfully. Mrs Duncan: Yes, there are a lot of these systems about behaviour for learning, positive discipline, and that sort of thing. What we talked about was that there is a large number of children who we call "ghost children". They come into school, do as they are told, do exactly what they are asked to do, and go home. Nobody talks to them; nobody praises them; nobody has anything to do with them. In this system we have changed that, and you get a stamp in your planner for turning up on time every day for a week, for not getting any bad comments, for just being well-behaved and doing what you are supposed to do. The other thing we did was, at the beginning of the year, we taught the behaviour that we want. I think that to assume that children know how to behave these days is a false assumption. Some children have never been taught how to behave. I have just had a manners and respect fortnight, where we have talked about how to behave properly. I am at the moment teaching my daughter, who is three, that; but some of these children have either never learned it or have forgotten it. So we have been giving them praise for opening a door for another person; for saying "please" and "thank you"; for just using basic manners. Some of them thought that it was a bit of a joke, but it has made them think about it. I think that you have to teach behaviour; you have to teach the children what you expect. Then you can hold them to account if they do not do it; but if you have never taught them and they are not taught it at home, then it is not their fault, is it? Q75 Chairman: This is such clear and sweet reason coming from the two of you. Why does it not permeate the culture of every school in the land? Mrs Duncan: I do not know. I would argue that there are a lot of schools where there is very good practice in terms of tackling bullying. Q76 Chairman: I am switching and swatching here, in the sense that all the stuff that you see in the press about "horrific schools" and so on, I do not find. I find that most of the schools I go to are very good schools, operating well, and all the rest. On the other hand, when we get the Children's Commissioner saying, "Bullying is endemic", you do worry that, below the surface, there are a lot of children who are not getting the best out of their educational opportunities, because bullying is not recognised in the way that you two seem to recognise it: as a genuine problem. Mrs Duncan: It is always there, and what slightly worries me is the rise of the use of technology for bullying. I have just been dealing with one incident that built up over the weekend on MSN. These girls were emailing each other nasty messages all weekend, and then it erupted in a fight on Monday. It is often, particularly with girls, texting and emailing, and things like that. That has increased in recent times; so I think that bullying just takes different forms as you go through time. Q77 Chairman: What rules do you have on mobile phones and technology like that? What are the rules in your school on the carrying and use of phones? Mrs Duncan: The rule in my school is that they can have one in their possession, but it has to be switched off or on silent, or whatever, and they cannot use it during the school day between 8.30 and 3.30. However, I am mindful that, particularly with girls, parents often want them to have one for safety reasons. I am trying to move with the times, but if they are using them during the school day they are confiscated. Q78 Chairman: John? Mr D'Abbro: The same as that, yes. I can think of occasions where children may have legitimate uses, or, rather, a legitimate need to use the phone during the school day, and they would have to ask permission - and I think that is reasonable. Q79 Chairman: Having four children, I have been familiar with bullying. One child particularly was bullied. What is the rule? I remember complaining to a head that the child was being bullied, and the feeling was, "The bullying is taking place just outside the school gate, and my remit only runs to the school gate". What do you see as your remit in terms of bullying? You have just said that the technology allows someone to bully all weekend, remotely. Mrs Duncan: I cannot punish a child if they have bullied somebody at the weekend, but sometimes that spills over into school the next day. So I punish them for what happens as a result. Q80 Chairman: What about the kids that bully by, "I'll wait for you outside the school"? Mrs Duncan: I have always taken the view - and in my previous school when I was deputy we also took this view - that while the children were in their school uniform, going to and from school, they are not my responsibility but I will take action if they misbehave. For example, if a member of the public rings up and says, "Some of your children were having a go at my daughter on the way home from school", then I will punish. That is not legislation yet. I am not actually allowed to do that yet, but it is in the new White Paper. We have always done that, because we feel that when they are wearing our uniform and they are moving to and from school they are representing the school, and they are seen to be a part of Horbury School. Mr D'Abbro: I go back to the certainty-of-the-consequence line again. I just think that it is such a powerful one. We had an interesting phenomenon at school recently, where some of our older children, who previously may well have been bullied, were allocated laptops. They were saying that they were frightened to go home, because the word had got out and they were saying, "We're going to be bullied by other children because they know we've got laptops". We then had to rethink our procedures for getting children home. I think that it does extend outside the school gates. If it means that we will escort children on to the buses so that they feel safe, that is the bottom line. If the bottom line of Every Child Matters is that you cannot learn unless you feel safe, then I think that it behoves us, as the people in loco parentis, to make sure that children do feel safe and that we do what it takes. I am sure that will not be popular with some of my colleagues; but, as a parent, what was really important for me to know was that when my children were at school they were safe, because, if they are safe, they are happy and they learn. If it means we have to go that extra mile, then I think that we do it. To come back to one of the points and why do not all schools do it - and I am not saying that they do not, I am not bashing the profession - it is much easier sometimes to turn a blind eye than see through the course of action set down by your procedures and policy. Sometimes it is more work to carry out an investigation, or do an audit, or follow something through; but my money says that if you do that, in the long run it will save you more work. The ethos you establish within your community is, "There will always be a follow-through - whether it is a positive one if you are getting it right, or a potentially negative one if you are getting it inappropriately wrong". Q81 Chairman: When we did our investigation into school transport, we found that one of the problems was bullying on the buses, whether it was school buses or buses. There was an argument that a dedicated school bus system gave you much more control of that phenomenon. Is there anything in your experience that touches on a school transport system and bullying? Mrs Duncan: It has not really been an issue in my current school. In my last school it was a bit of an issue, and we had sixth-form monitors. They rode on the buses and that was their responsibility. They came and reported any incidents or anything that was going on on the buses. It does not really make any difference if it is a bus dedicated just to the children from your school or if it has other people on it: I think that incidents will still occur. Mr D'Abbro: I think that it is acknowledged that there will potentially be a problem. If you acknowledge that there is a problem, you then put steps in place to manage it if there is a problem or, conversely, to stop it happening in the first place. Again, I can think of some of our children who were ridiculed and bullied because they went to a special school. So we had to teach them strategies about how to manage that, which is not about lashing out physically - because that was the easiest way - but using different strategies. When the children saw - because there was a consequence for the children from the mainstream school who had been ridiculing them - that that was followed through seriously by the school, we found that they did not have to resort to physical violence to sort it out: they used more appropriate assertiveness techniques to resolve those issues. Q82 Mr Chaytor: We have focused very much, in both the earlier session and now, on secondary schools. Presumably children do not just suddenly start becoming bullies - or do they? In your experience, is it a habit that continues over a number of years, or can children become bullies for a short period of time and then the problem is cured? Mr D'Abbro: People bully - because it is people, not just children, and we must not lose sight of that - because they do not feel good about themselves. I think that starts in the school process for some children when they are very young. Yes, we can put fixes on a secondary school. In some ways, some of the procedures that we have talked about are more effective in the secondary sector; but they need to be because the schools are smaller. It is actually an issue we need to address in all sectors, but particularly with young children. The children I work with are that extreme of children who are most bullied or the most bullying at a very young age. What I passionately believe is that, by giving children the right resources, i.e. human resources, we can effect change in children's lives and they can learn not to be bullied. It is not a quick fix. Sometimes problems will take as long to solve as they took to come about. It is acknowledging that there is a problem and that you can get, believe it or not, five and six year-olds who bully their parents. That is a really quasi-flip of bullying, but I have seen it. You then have to say that, if we do not address it at five and six, by 14 and 15 we will have a child who will be banged up, either in residential schooling or with a custodial sentence. Q83 Mr Chaytor: Are we doing enough in primary schools in terms of early assessment and in terms of passing information to secondary schools? Mrs Duncan: Yes, the information is passed to us. If you are working, as we work, on a pyramid principle. Q84 Mr Chaytor: So you would get a list of potential bullies? Mrs Duncan: And people who have been bullied as well. That is passed to me and then we will keep an eye on them; do some sort of work to prevent it happening early on. The only thing that worries me is when I get information passed about victims of bullying. I had some parents who came to see me when the child had just joined in Year 7 and said, "We're very worried about her coming. Our daughter has been bullied at primary school. We were bullied at school, and we know that she is going to get bullied here". They had already set that in her mind. She was waiting to be bullied when she arrived. So you have to be a little bit careful, because sometimes coming to secondary school can be a fresh start for children. They can maybe leave that circle of bullies behind and make that fresh start. You have to be aware of what has gone on before, but let us not make it a big issue so that it just carries on. Mr D'Abbro: My experience of victims - limited and not of the vast numbers of children that Deborah has - is that there is often a correlation between the mental health of their parents and that child, and that they become the symptom-bearers, in jargon terms, for their parents. Q85 Mr Chaytor: Given the crucial significance of parents in all of this, are there examples of good practice, of working with parents over a period of time rather than just bringing in the parent to discuss a particular incident? Is that possible? Mrs Duncan: The behaviour mentor lady that I am talking about, I do not see her at work every single day, but in one of the meetings we had with parents she told the parents some strategies to use with the child. She said, "When she comes home at night, I want you to ask her to think of two or three positive things that have happened during the day". Because, again, what the parents were doing was saying, "What's happened today? How bad has it been?". So saying, "Come on, tell me some positive things. You can tell us the bad stuff afterwards, but tell us three positive things first". She has worked in the holidays with groups of parents of vulnerable children, to give them those sorts of skills. It is not across the board. We do not do it across the board with parents. Q86 Mr Chaytor: This is the initiative of one individual school. Mrs Duncan: Yes. Mr D'Abbro: Going back to the point that Helen made, in the school where we work we have our own child or family counsellor. I know it was something that was in Sir Alan Steer's report: the importance of - we call it something different, but we would call it someone who is a link between the school and the family of who is at the school. Our child and family counsellor will go out and meet parents before the child comes into the school. So they are actually a bridge, as it were. Further to the intake conference, they are the bridge, the facilitator of the process by which the child comes into the school. We find that has given us vast reams of information about the child and their family, in the context of their family and in their home; but also alerts us so that we can be aware of where there are things that are not written down about the child being a bully or the child being a victim. On a different model, it is the same sort of process. It is about saying, "Let's use other paraprofessionals to support our anti-bullying strategy". Mrs Duncan: I think that workforce remodelling is a good thing, which has contributed to helping children who are being bullied. I have appointed three pastoral support officers, and they work with two year groups each. They do that sort of work. They ring home; they are constantly in conversation; sometimes they go out to the houses. Then I also have my behaviour mentor. All these people are there all day long, to be able to deal with issues to do with welfare. In the past, you had a head of year who had a teaching timetable and would say, "I'm really sorry you're crying and in a mess, but I'm going to go and teach PE now. I'm sorry". We have gone past that now, and we are now employing people specifically to look after the welfare of children - which I think is a really good thing, if only we had the money to back that up. However, that is another argument. We are now doing that and it is a really good thing, but it does cost money to do it, of course. Q87 Mr Chaytor: What is the level of liaison between the staff that you have working in your school on those issues and the comment that John made about the relationship with mental health? Surely this is something that goes beyond the school and needs a multi‑agency approach between education and health? Are there examples of where this is happening now? Mrs Duncan: John will work even more so with the agencies, but we work with CAMS; we work with ---- Q88 Chairman: CAMS? Mrs Duncan: CAMS is the Children's Mental Health.... I cannot remember what it stands for. Q89 Helen Jones: Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. Mrs Duncan: We work with them. We work with educational welfare officers very closely, who come in to school and then we say, "Can you go and visit this family?". We work with the youth offending teams. All those sorts of agencies will come in and liaise with us. Q90 Mr Chaytor: Do you think the schools should get a score in their performance tables or their Ofsted report for the way they do these things? Mrs Duncan: They do. Q91 Mr Chaytor: Ofsted reports are fairly tentative ---- Mrs Duncan: In the self-evaluation form you have to score yourself on how you manage the personal and social well-being of children. Q92 Mr Chaytor: Yes, but parents are not interested in what you say about yourself; they are interested in what Ofsted says about you, are they not? Should it be higher profile in the whole question of information about ---- Mrs Duncan: Yes, but the whole point about the new Ofsted is that you score yourself and then Ofsted will make sure that you are telling the truth. They will give a score for that. Q93 Mr Chaytor: Should both your score and the Ofsted judgment then be public knowledge? Mrs Duncan: It is public. It is on the website when you have had an Ofsted. It is there, so they can see what you have scored: whether you have scored "outstanding", "good", "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" for that particular element of school. Q94 Chairman: Would you show Ofsted that list of problems with bullying that you have? Mrs Duncan: Yes. Once you start trying to cover up a situation, then I am questioning what is there to hide. Mr D'Abbro: If you said to me that children in our school did not make racist comments, I would say that is not true: they do. But what actually happens is, if they do, they are absolutely challenged, both by their peers - and that to me is the evolution of the ethos - and not least by colleagues. Q95 Chairman: Are you better on anti-racist behaviour? Mr D'Abbro: The problem for me around the bullying agenda is that we do not celebrate diversity enough as a society, in the broadest sense of the word. I take what my colleague was saying about anti-homophobia. I am anti anything that is not okay. If it does not feel right, it is not right, whether it is racism; whether it is sexism. You must always challenge what is not okay. I can understand why there is a need to highlight certain trends within society. If we have a bigger emphasis at the moment on homophobic inappropriate behaviour, then let us challenge that; but let us not lose sight of the fact that all bullying is not okay. As I said earlier, if it does not feel right, it is not all right. That is where the teachers, my colleagues and other paraprofessionals have to challenge children and say, "That's not okay" every time. Mrs Duncan: In terms of some of the language the children use and talking about the homophobia, I do not know if you have noticed this but there is a trend at the moment for children to use "gay" as a derogatory term. They say, "Oh, that's really gay". I say to them, "What do you mean? What does that mean?". I do not even think they know that it is a homophobic term. They are not using it like that, but it is common parlance and I always challenge that and encourage the staff to challenge that as well. Q96 Mr Chaytor: Can I come back to the question of training or in-service professional development? What is your assessment of the quality of the professional development opportunities in dealing with bullying? Mrs Duncan: There is plenty out there. Q97 Mr Chaytor: Do your staff take advantage of it? Mrs Duncan: I tend to target certain staff who deal with this sort of thing all the time and send them on that training. Every couple of years we will do a whole staff training day on it. I have just done one on the new safeguarding legislation and child protection, and in that we did cover some things to do with bullying. However, I think that it is patchy across the piece. I actually do not agree that the headteachers are trained very well in how to deal with it. I think that I have learned how to deal with it out of experience, and I cannot remember the NPQH qualification having anything about bullying in it at all. Q98 Chairman: Could you spell that acronym out for the reporter? Mrs Duncan: The National Professional Qualification for Headship. Q99 Mr Chaytor: Can you tell us what the National College for School Leadership is doing? You are not impressed by the ---- Mrs Duncan: I am impressed by the National College for School Leadership in many ways, but not in terms of training headteachers about how to deal with bullying, no. Chairman: That is what we want to get on the record. I want to bring Jeff in here on a supplementary. Q100 Jeff Ennis: Just a quick supplementary on the line of questioning that David has just pursued, particularly aimed at Deborah. Do you at any point in time discuss bullying in the pyramid meetings that you have with the primary schools at your school? Mrs Duncan: Yes, we do. It is usually because there is maybe an initiative coming up, or for that reason. In terms of when we get that data about who is being bullied and who is being the bully, that comes as written data usually; or, when we are taking in children's special educational needs, then we do have one-to-one meetings and that is discussed. Jeff Ennis: So you do not discuss it across the pyramid on occasions - okay. Chairman: You are impressing me so much, I think that you ought to come in and look at the Parliamentary Labour Party. We only have about five per cent of bullies, but they are a bit of a nuisance! Q101 Mr Marsden: I have only just escaped from the dentist, so forgive me if these issues have been touched on before. Deborah, I wonder if I could ask you, in terms of the sort of bullying that you are dealing with - obviously there is a range of bullying, there is verbal, there is psychological, there is physical - in terms of your strategies to deal with it, and in terms both with teachers and with your support people, do you think you need different strategies with each of those groups to do it? Are there core principles that apply whether it is verbal, or psychological or physical, or indeed whether it is a mixture of all three? Mrs Duncan: The core principles are always the same: that it is not acceptable. I always say this to the children and the staff. If we are going to work in the school - I have just over 100 staff altogether and nearly 1,100 children - we all have to get on with each other and have respect for each other. So the core principles are always the same: it is not tolerated. How you deal with it is different. I have had an incident this year where I have had to exclude somebody permanently, because they have physically assaulted somebody else so violently that I could not let that child stay in the school. That is a different punishment to somebody who maybe is just name-calling. They still get punished, but at different levels. Q102 Mr Marsden: That is in terms of the perpetrators. I am also interested in terms of dealing with the children who are being bullied. I notice in your biography that you say that you have pastoral support officers, who obviously help those children in that position. Again, in terms of the types of bullying, does that require a different approach, whether it is from teachers or whether it is from your support officers, in terms of dealing with children, depending on the type of bullying? I am thinking particularly in terms of training. Mrs Duncan: I do not think that it necessarily needs lots of different approaches, because often a low-level bullying situation can then become one of physical attack later. Q103 Mr Marsden: Do we have any statistics on that progression at all? Mrs Duncan: I have not. I do not know if there are any out there. Q104 Mr Marsden: Do you know, John? Is this the sort of thing where there are statistics out there as to the extent to which one sort of bullying then develops into another? Mr D'Abbro: Some of the evidence we had earlier suggests that there are some correlations, but I think the consensus was that some of the evidence we have is quite patchy. Chairman: We got something on the record from Kidscape and others in the earlier session but, you are right, it is still patchy. Q105 Mr Marsden: Coming to you, John, and looking at your biography and your particular involvement with children with BESD, as you may know, we are currently conducting an inquiry into special educational needs. As part of that inquiry, the whole issue of children with SEN being taught in mainstream settings as opposed to special school settings is obviously a big issue. I wondered whether you had either any views or any evidence as to whether the increasing integration of children with SEN into mainstream schools over the last 15 to 20 years correlates in any way with levels of bullying against them; or indeed what views you have about whether children with SEN in mainstream schools - special schools as well, but specifically in mainstream - face particular problems and difficulties. Mr D'Abbro: How long have you got? Ideologically, I wish we did not have special schools. That would give me early retirement! I believe in a concept that, when we segregate children within our society, we actually perpetuate a culture which says some children are different from others, in a negative way rather than a positive way. In an ideal world, therefore, we would not have segregated provision. However, some children cannot be worked with within the mainstream sector, even because of their own disability or because the schools are not teed up for it. So I do believe that it is okay to have special schools within the way our culture runs. My own view is that I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that, when more children with disabilities take up their place within mainstream schools, there is a correlation with bullying. Having said that, some of the children we work with, as and when they go back to mainstream schools and they get mainstream opportunities, sometimes say, "The care that we get within this special school is better than the care that we get within a mainstream school". No disrespect to my mainstream school colleagues but, in a school where there are 80 children and 50 adults, you will get more individual care than in a school where there are 100 adults and thousands of children. I think it is about saying what is the most appropriate environment for each individual child. It is not a cliché, but all children have their own special needs and all children are special. Lots of children can work in mainstream schools, get their needs met and be very effective, and some children need something different. I do not know if that answers the question, but I do not think that, because there are more children with special needs and disabilities in mainstream schools, there is more bullying. Q106 Mr Marsden: It is also true, is it not, that children can be - sometimes unthinkingly, sometimes deliberately - very cruel in picking out aspects of what they regard as physical or indeed behavioural difficulties? That is obviously a factor. Deborah, in terms of your school - I have no idea how many children you have in your school who are statemented or with SEN - in your experience, does this form a significant part of a bullying pattern? If so, do you have a particular strategy to deal with it? Mrs Duncan: I think that it is on an individual basis, really. Sometimes children who have special needs can be bullied in the mainstream, because of the facts you have talked about and because we do not have the staffing levels to be able to give them that sort of individual help. I have one girl in my school at the moment who has Kabuki syndrome. She is a very small girl and she has particular features. The students go out of their way to look after her, to look out for her, to help her, to be kind to her. There has been no evidence of bullying with her. It is almost the other way: they all love her and they all look out for her. Yet there has been an example of one boy who has had to go from my school to a special school, because he was so weak in his ability to access the curriculum. So he could not go into the mainstream classes with the children; he had to be in our base, which is our SEN area. He could not interact with the other children because they did not understand his needs, and he did get bullied and then also became a bully back, because he was hitting people who were making fun of him. So I think that it is very much on an individual, case-by-case basis. Q107 Mr Marsden: Do you think that things have improved across the piece? I just think back to my own school days and some of the people I was with who perhaps had very, very slight physical or behavioural difficulties. Other children can be very cruel in picking on those sorts of things. We have become much more aware, in the best sense of the word we have become much more correct, about the way in which we deal with not just children with disabilities but with people with disabilities. Do you think that is reflected sufficiently in the system or do we actually need to do more, does the department perhaps need to do more, in terms of focusing on those children with special educational needs so that they are not the focus for bullying or intimidation? Ms Duncan: I am thinking how we could help the situation more, and I know I have already said this once and I should not say it again, but it comes down to funding. If you have got enough staff there to give them that help, attention and support, then it will make their passage through the school easier, if they have got special educational needs. Q108 Chairman: You have already said that you have got a lot more resources than you used to have. Ms Duncan: Did I? Q109 Chairman: You did. I think you gave an answer to Helen that there was a time ---- Ms Duncan: The head of year. Q110 Chairman: The head of year. Ms Duncan: I was saying that I have chosen. It is probably another topic. Q111 Chairman: You have got more support staff than you used to have, surely. Ms Duncan: Yes. Mr D'Abbro: Schools are much more complex institutions than they were 20 years ago. Ms Duncan: They are more complex, yes, but I just have chosen to spend the money on them instead of something else. It does not mean to say I have got more resources. I have to manage my budget in a clever way so that I have got these pastoral support officers. Q112 Stephen Williams: Something that we have not really looked at so far is emotional support for the victims of bullying. What guidance is available to schools for the different emotional needs of different types of victims? There is a clear indication from the evidence that we have got from each of you of what is the difference between being black and being gay. The answer is that you do not have to tell your mother that you are black. If you are a gay pupil or a pupil who is perceived as being gay and you are bullied, you have different emotional needs to other categories of people who are being bullied because you might have a peer group you can relate to, but when you are 14, 15 or 16 you probably have no idea at all in your school whether any other people in your class or in your school are in the same situation as you, and you have got no-one to empathise with. Is there any guidance available to schools as to how they are meant to support people in that situation? Ms Duncan: Not really any very clear guidance. There are always opportunities for professional development for staff to go and train on specific areas of bullying, like homophobic bullying; but, no, we do not really have mechanisms whereby we could have a gay support group in school because I think the legislation is still hanging over us that we are not supposed to be encouraging students to be gay but we want to support them if they are, type of thing. We have not got the type of system where we can get them together so they can support each other, you are quite right, whereas if you are black, you can get together with other children who are black and support each other. No, I cannot think of any instances. Mr D'Abbro: To go back to your point, I mentioned the quality of the relationship that the teacher has with his or her students, and I would like to think everyone in the room can have thought of someone at their school who they had a relationship with. I think it is about the leader creating an ethos within their school that says every child will have someone who they can relate to, either an older peer or a mentor or a teacher or another paraprofessional who is in the school, so that you ensure that everyone has got someone they can go to. It is easy for me to say that in a smaller setting than in a larger setting. I would imagine most of us went to large schools at some stage in our school career and we can all think of someone we could have gone to, and I think we have to maximise those opportunities within school life. Ms Duncan: For children who do not make friends naturally, we do artificially pick somebody else out in their class and say, "I want you to stick by them and look out for them and look after them", and so we make sure they are not entirely on their own. Q113 Stephen Williams: Basically, the answer is that there is not any guidance all from DfES on how to emotionally support the victims of bullying. Ms Duncan: I do not know. If there is some out there, I have not seen it. Q114 Stephen Williams: You are the sort of head who would actively seek it out? Ms Duncan: I hope so, yes. Q115 Chairman: Are you surprised that the evidence that was presented in the first session shows that there is more bullying in the lower schools, in the primary and junior schools, rather than in secondary? Ms Duncan: Yes, I am actually. Q116 Chairman: I imagine, like all behaviour, the earlier we crack it and confront it and deal with it the better. Ms Duncan: Yes. Q117 Chairman: Is that part of your feeder school relationship? Ms Duncan: Absolutely. As we talked about before, we do discuss it as a pyramid. We do share the information with each other. Q118 Chairman: John, you are not surprised? Mr D'Abbro: I am not surprised, no. I think the manifestation of the bullying that we see in secondary, in my experience, has started much further down in the primary sector, and, in some cases, God forbid, pre-school. We are now beginning to identify that within some of the pre-school groups. Some of our colleagues are beginning to assess children who they think will not have the right skills and the right competency of getting on with people when they are actually coming into the school; and that raises questions about the parenting and nurturing experiences that very young children are getting or are not getting. Q119 Chairman: This has been an excellent session. Thank you very much for your evidence. I am afraid you have been so good you are in danger of members of this Committee popping in to see your school, Deborah, particularly the Yorkshire dwellers here, but you also, John, because you are not too far from here. Thank you very much for the information you have given us. Ms Duncan: Thank you. |