Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
MS CAROLINE
DAY, MR
BENET MIDDLETON,
DR SHOBHA
DAS AND
MS CHRIS
GRAVELL
22 NOVEMBER 2006
Q120 Chairman: I welcome the witnesses
to our deliberations. Thank you very much for giving up time to
come before the Committee. We take our inquiry into bullying very
seriously. We hope to get some information to add to the very
good written submissions that you have sent to the Committee.
Starting from the left with Mr Middleton, in a couple of minutes
can you say why we should be holding this inquiry? What is the
problem? There is frenetic activity taking place in anti-bullying
week. A good many Members of Parliament like myself have been
to schools. I went to a school in Skipton on Friday and participated
in an anti-bullying session. How big is the problem, and do we
need this inquiry?
Mr Middleton: The National Autistic
Society provides a lot of services to a lot of people with autism.
It probably supports about 2,800 children across the UK and runs
six special schools with around 400 students in them. It also
provides an education advice line, so the society has a lot of
direct contact with children and families and feedback about their
experience of bullying. The society has also carried out some
research recently which highlights the full extent of the problem.
About one in 100 children have autism which is a condition that
creates barriers to communication and social interaction. Inevitably,
by its very nature it makes children much more susceptible to
bullying. The studies suggest that about four out of 10 children
with autism—that is probably an underestimate because those
are parental views rather than necessarily direct experience—rising
to six out of 10 children with Asperger's syndrome experience
some form of bullying. Whilst we recognise that a lot of schools
are going the extra mile to support children with Asperger's syndrome
and autism, and many parents tell us about really good policies
in some schools, an awful lot are not. That creates major issues
which often lead to a spiralling of bad behaviour and bad relations
with schools that can have a major impact on people's lives. We
think that strengthened guidance on bullying, particularly for
disability and autism, and training for teachers and schools to
take a whole school approach to thinking about disability and
autism within their anti-bullying and other policies is absolutely
critical.
Q121 Chairman: Last week I was talking
to an old school friend of mine. I said that I could not remember
any bullying ever in my school. Then he said, "What about
those two boys who could not march in step in the cadet force?
We made their lives a misery." I totally forgot that. One
can assume one's school days were free of bullying. It brought
me up very sharply.
Ms Gravell: I work for the Advisory
Centre for Education which advises parents. We fund help lines
and hear about bullying from the parents' point of view. I think
you will see from our written evidence that we have some powerful
case studies which show that special educational needs or disabilities
are a big feature among the victims. I can certainly back up what
Mr Middleton has said about the need for school policies to include
a read-across to things like SEN and disability equality policies.
From our point of view, parents find that persistent bullying
is one of the most intractable problems to deal with in schools.
Where schools do not respond there is nothing very much that parents
can do about it. They can go right up the ladder of complaint
to the local authority and still not get anywhere. Sometimes the
local authority threatens to prosecute parents when their child
does not attend school because it has become frightened or mentally
ill because of persistent bullying. We do not want new legislation
because the Education and Inspections Act has just been passed.
Q122 Chairman: This Committee bears
the scars!
Ms Gravell: Section 60 and following
provisions of that Act now enable local authorities to intervene
where children are not safe in schools. They can issue warning
notices that require schools to do something about what is happening.
It seems to me that this would be an excellent use of that power.
We have suggested that there is an agency in each local authority
to which parents can go to offer mediation so that things can
be settled at a much lower level, but if they face total intransigence
in a school that is falling apart and may not have the capacity
to put itself together on its own children are victimised along
the way and suffer awful things. When I was on the advice line
on Monday I heard about a child who had been concussed and was
in hospital for two days. The school, possibly in an effort not
to report it properly, just brought him home by car to his parent's
house and did not tell her what had happened. It was only later
when he started to become dizzy that she realised he had a head
injury. This sort of thing is positively dangerous and cannot
be allowed to go on. There needs to be some arrangement whereby
there is speedy and effective reaction by the statutory authorities
to make sure that the duty of care to children is fulfilled.
Q123 Chairman: What about parents
who complain about bullying outside the school gate? That is something
with which I and my children were familiar. Traditionally, the
head would say that his remit finished at the school gate. How
do people these days react to that view?
Ms Gravell: I would go along with
the current idea of extending behaviour and anti-bullying policies
as much as possible into the community and getting the whole school
community to agree the strategies, principles and so on. To some
extent that reaches into the community. There are disciplinary
powers in the new Act which allow punishment to be imposed for
behaviour outside school where the school is involved in some
way. What we would be looking for is not so much punishment—we
are not in favour of extremely punitive responses to bullying—as
constructive preventative work that a lot of schools do. I am
sure that you have read a lot of the research by now and heard
about it. That should involve the whole school.
Q124 Chairman: Last week some parents,
who were not my constituents, wrote to me to say that their 13-year-old
daughter had been badly beaten by three girls on the top deck
of a bus whilst going home from school. It was stopped by another
passenger. There was very slow action taken, and no action was
taken by the police. Is that not to be taken seriously?
Ms Gravell: Absolutely. One of
our cases is like that. A child was persistently being picked
on, taunted and subjected to physical assaults on a bus to and
from school. She was the only black child in the school. Something
must be done. I am not necessarily in favour of asking that the
police intervene, but sometimes that is the only thing we can
advise parents to do.
Q125 Helen Jones: You talked about
having constructive policies to deal with bullying, with which
I agree, but the problem many of us encounter all the time is
that schools whose teachers are not well trained in dealing with
it can use that as an excuse for doing very little about bullying.
That makes the victim feel as if he or she is not being taken
seriously. How do you stop that happening?
Ms Gravell: I go back to the issue
that local authorities may be able to require schools to be trained
properly. If one has a school like that it is probably chaotic
all the way round. Discipline will probably not be followed through
consistently and there will not be a culture of respect.
Q126 Chairman: Dr Das, what is your
view on this? You have a big and impressive team of 23 staff and
volunteers.
Dr Das: Not all of them work in
a specialist way with young people. We have two people who work
with children in schools. For us, one of the interesting matters
is that we have been doing case work for about 15 years and every
year the single biggest client group has been the under-16s. That
is quite telling. I understand that nationally the statistics
suggest that in relation to racist incidents, which is our field
of expertise, about 50% involve a young person under 17 as either
victim or perpetrator. This is a huge issue. To echo some of the
things that have been said, it has a tremendous effect on the
lives of young people. We have experience of children who have
turned to bleaching themselves to try to turn white because of
the constant taunting about the colour of their skin. One sees
under-achievement and truancy. In a sense it sets up communities
for failure. To go back to the point raised by Helen Jones, part
of the problem is that teachers do not have confidence to deal
with this. There is a lot of fear about talking of issues to do
with race. People are scared about terminology; they do not how
to talk about it, so often they end up not talking about it at
all. Basically, you send to the victims the impression that teachers
do not care when that may not be the case; it is just that they
do not know what to do about it. That sets up circles of retaliation.
If 15 times you have been bullied and reported it to the teacher
nothing has been done on the sixteenth occasion you may raise
your fist and hit back, but then immediate disciplinary sanctions
work really well. This puts communities in a very unfavourable
light in some senses. Part of the problem is that for children
bullying happens not just round schools; it happens around homes
as well. As for a lot of the people we deal with, in school they
are bullied and are called "black bastard"—all
kinds of things. I am sorry for the language, but racism and bullying
are ugly. When they come home it is not as if they have peace
and quiet for eight hours of play time and they can go into the
garden or relax in their rooms and listen to music. The children
are waiting for the next brick to come through the window. It
is that dramatic for the lives of many children in the cases that
we deal with. There is also very poor joint working in some instances.
Bristol is very lucky and is a very good model. We work across
four local authorities in an area formerly called Avon and now
known as CUBA: Bristol, Bath, North and North East Somerset and
South Gloucestershire. Three of those local authority areas are
very rural with small BME populations. Bristol is relatively more
cosmopolitan. I believe that Bristol's children and young people's
services has geared itself up a little more to deal with issues
to do with racism and racist bullying in schools. They have learned
how better to connect with other organisations, such as the police,
SARI and Bristol City Council. It is working in a much more integrated
fashion. One of the problems is that sometimes schools will say
that they have done what the policy says they need to do, but
they need to go beyond that. Often schools will say that they
have it on a piece of paper and so they are safe; they can tick
the box, but those documents do not live; they stay in a filing
cabinet and nobody ever refers to them. I believe that if we do
not deal with it we set up strategies like community cohesion
for absolute failure.
Q127 Chairman: I ask Caroline Day
to come in.
Ms Day: I am from Barnardo's.
The track that we have been taking on this matter is to work directly
with young people and children. We work with 120,000 children
a year. One of our key areas of work is to look at their mental
health and emotional wellbeing. In young people's own words, bullying
is the most significant factor that is harmful to their own emotional
wellbeing and mental health. They have also identified that it
is the one thing that makes their schooling most unhappy for them.
They have been particularly concerned about identity-related bullying.
We did some research with them on the question of what identity-related
bullying was and whether they thought this was worse than any
other kind. They were able to articulate what they saw and thought
was different about people. Whilst difference was the main thing—it
could be any factor from weight and height to the clothes that
people wear—the three important things that they mentioned
were sexuality—the fact that a person might be lesbian,
gay or bisexual—race, colour and the different factors that
go with that, such as culture, dress, language and accent; and
also whether or not you were disabled. The research revealed,
quite interestingly, young people's perceptions about what could
be done to improve this and whether or not bullying was worse
because of those three factors than general bullying. That view
was generally supported because they were things that could not
be changed. We have done a lot of work directly with young people
to hear what they have to say about it: how they want things to
change, their views on present policies and how it can be taken
forward from there.
Chairman: We have a very good general
impression. The more I listen and learn about the subject the
more depressed I become. Let us try to look at particular types
of bullying.
Q128 Mr Chaytor: To pursue Caroline
Day's point, in terms of what may be described as prejudice-based
bullying is it different in kind from other kinds of bullying?
Are the techniques that children use against those who are victims
because they belong to some minority group or other different
from other methods of bullying?
Ms Day: It seemed to vary sometimes.
Those were the very specific factors that they picked out and
were the things that put young people more at risk. Vulnerability
and resilience also seemed to be two factors which young people
identified. We had some situations where young people said that,
say, someone of Chinese origin would be bullied at school, whereas
in another situation someone of Chinese origin was the most popular
boy in the school and everybody thought he was wonderful. We were
trying to unpick the reason for that. It was something different
that made you vulnerable. We also realised that it very much depended
on the bullies themselves. Young people were very quick to identify
two types of bully. There were the ones who said that they wanted
to be big, clever and popular; they did it as a method of control.
But there were also bullies who were very insecure and could in
turn have been bulled and abused not just within the school but
possibly at home as well. It was their way to try to establish
themselves. If they could make themselves feel better by using
that control and domination over somebody else that was the factor
they would use.
Q129 Mr Chaytor: Do the bullies tend
to use different techniques against minority group victims, or
are the techniques common across the board?
Ms Day: I would say that based
on our research they are fairly common. There might be different
techniques between gender. Sometimes the methods used by boys
would tend to be more violent, whereas girls would use far more
emotional and verbal tactics to exclude people. The general methods
themselves seemed to be common whatever the reason for the bullying
in the first place. It could be physical or verbal. The whole
area of relational or emotional bullying seems to be quite a big
problem. Young people have begun to mention the use of technology—cyber
bullying and the use of mobile phones—but in our research
that has not been as great as suggested in other pieces of research
or in the media at the moment.
Q130 Mr Chaytor: Do you believe there
is a case for a separate set of policies for prejudice-based bullying
or not? Is it so distinct that there should be separate guidelines,
or if the techniques are broadly the same can they just be rolled
up in general anti-bullying policies?
Ms Day: Often it is about the
whole ethos. What young people were saying was that no bullying
was acceptable. It is about having that ethos in schools with
a whole school approach and everybody having those values so that
there is no bullying within those kinds of brackets. I do not
know that different policies or one policy that covered all is
the way forward.
Q131 Mr Chaytor: Does anyone feel
strongly that there ought to be a separate set of guidelines to
deal with prejudice-based bullying?
Mr Middleton: No, not at the moment.
One of our concerns is that if you look at the DfES guidelines
on bullying in schools they already take a different approach.
Certainly, from the perspective of disability it seems to us that
it is not as strong. In a way, in the guidance more emphasis is
placed on the person with the disability than on dealing with
the behaviour. It is subtle; it is not black and white, but certainly
there is more emphasis placed on the child, whether it is finding
safe havens for the child or teaching the child to be assertive,
whereas with sexist and racist bullying it is bit clearer that
one should be addressing the bullying behaviour. For the moment,
the guidance differs and that is not really acceptable.
Q132 Mr Chaytor: Therefore, what
would you like to see added to the DfES guidelines to make them
more effective?
Mr Middleton: We would like to
get rid of the distinction between different types of bullying
which appears to be in the guidance already and make it absolutely
clear that a school should be tackling bullying as a whole and
dealing with the bullying behaviour, not necessarily thinking
about how to remove the child from that situation.
Ms Gravell: Quite often, in anti-racist
bullying policies one has a strong rights-based approach which
is absolutely correct, but one does not find that in the disability
and special needs bullying codes where it seems to be far more
to do with protecting victims and victims being trained in social
skills so they do not get bullied. For some children that will
not be possible anyway. Across the board we would like to see
a unified idea of respect and rights for all school pupils and
the bullies who become victims and the victims who became bullies
will need just as much support. That is one of the reasons we
are not in favour of very strong punitive approaches.
Dr Das: I think that there is
a case to be made for the same policies to deal with prejudice-based
bullying at the moment. The long-term aim needs to be to have
a completely unified approach to bullying across the board. At
this point because of the lack of confidence of authorities in
dealing in particular with prejudice-based bullying I think we
need to cast a special eye on that field.
Q133 Mr Chaytor: What kind of special
guidance do you envisage?
Dr Das: It has to be a package.
One aspect of the policy has to be about sanctions and teachers,
or whoever is dealing with it, thinking much more clearly about
how to get across to the bully the significance of this kind of
behaviour but also how we provide the specialist support that
the victims of prejudice-based bullying need and which perhaps
the victims of other kinds of bullying do not need. But the other
aspect has to be about staff training and a rolling review which
is not something that is done and finished; it does not finish
quite that easily.
Q134 Mr Chaytor: Chris Gravell mentioned
the section 60 provisions in the new Act. As to the question of
withdrawing children, is it always better to withdraw children
from school where bullying is so intense, or is there an advantage
in keeping them in the school to help both victim and bully confront
the issue? Where does the balance lie?
Ms Gravell: Are you talking about
excluding bullies from school or withdrawing children who are
bullied?
Q135 Mr Chaytor: I am referring to
victims.
Ms Gravell: We are utterly against
it. We often find that parents withdraw their children because
it is the only thing they can do to keep them safe in their eyes.
The child may be absolutely terrified of going to school and the
parent cannot physically get the child out of the door. Obviously,
that is not advisable because the child is missing out on education.
We have also found that schools unlawfully exclude children for
so-called health and safety reasons if they are victims of bullying.
Q136 Mr Chaytor: Schools exclude
children who are the victims?
Ms Gravell: They exclude the victims
for health and safety reasons. We have at least two cases in our
case studies to which reference is made in our written evidence.
They say that they cannot protect the child at lunch time or during
the unstructured times of the day.
Q137 Mr Chaytor: The child then becomes
a double victim?
Ms Gravell: Yes; that happens.
If the school cannot for some reason do the job that it is meant
to do, which is to keep the children safe, that is the sort of
thing that happens. Obviously, that is wrong because the child
is missing out on education. If the child remains in school it
may be missing out anyway because it cannot attend or concentrate,
and it is missing out on the social mix in the so-called unstructured
times.
Q138 Mr Chaytor: The consensus seems
to be that the concept of cyber bullying is on the increase whereas
general levels of bullying are declining. Does everyone agree
with that? What can schools do to deal with this? Can schools
have any responsibility for the way their pupils use mobile phones
outside school hours, for example? Is there some really good practice
on the part of schools in dealing with this new phenomenon?
Ms Day: Our research reveals very
mixed views, with some young people saying that it is an issue
and others saying it is not. We have not gone as far as look at
how it can be tackled or what kind of good practice can come out
of this. Unfortunately, I think that it is such a widely diverse
area and so difficult to pin down with the nature of the task
in hand that the young people with whom we work and our staff
have not been able to target that yet. I suggest that it comes
back to the situation within schools and the home and the values
and ethos about treating people with respect.
Q139 Mr Chaytor: Is this too recent
a phenomenon to have attracted any serious examination?
Mr Middleton: We try to provide
guidance to parents who come to us. Unfortunately, it is all about
the behaviour of the child and it is to do with ensuring that
the child does not make his or her mobile phone number available
to people and reporting examples of cyber bullying to internet
service providers and chat room providers, but it is still quite
early days. At the moment it is a defensive type of action.
Dr Das: We do not have very much
experience of cyber bullying. The cases that we have had relate
to adults.
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