Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-172)

MS CAROLINE DAY, MR BENET MIDDLETON, DR SHOBHA DAS AND MS CHRIS GRAVELL

22 NOVEMBER 2006

  Q160  Jeff Ennis: I put down an Early Day Motion in relation to that.

  Mr Middleton: A number of schools and individual teachers have been nominated for good practice, that is, where the school has acknowledged that disability and autism is an issue and it needs to think about how to respond to it that has made a huge difference. In answer to your question, I think that it is a combination of things. I believe that the DfES guidance needs to be strengthened so that schools have a clearer idea of what it is they need to do, and schools then need to think about whole school approaches. Individual teachers need to think about how they communicate with the parents and pupil to identify what that person needs. It is about what the individual child requires. If you like, it is at all three levels.

  Q161  Jeff Ennis: As a supplementary, DfES guidance recognises the importance of monitoring anti-bullying work to see whether it is effective, but are schools also doing this as they should be?

  Ms Gravell: I do not think that evidence is coming through necessarily. Sometimes the problem lies with the victim who reports bullying; or the number of complaints is so small, possibly because given the school culture in the playground that this should be going on is thought to be relatively normal. Therefore, that level of reporting, even if it gets into the school self-evaluation and possibly into Ofsted reports, may conceal a much bigger problem. The other matter is that where individuals have been bullied and have suffered they need to be treated in a much more individualised way rather like looked-after children and their outcomes need to be subject to individual attention, not mass monitoring. All our studies of serious cases show that the solutions for those children need to be different in each case. One can have total invisibility in management information of what are very serious underlying issues. I think that when Ofsted talked to the Committee in May it said that it did not have figures and did not believe that they were being collected. Therefore, there is lack of accountability in terms of schools knowing what it is they are reporting. Even if they are reporting it properly it is pretty weak at the moment in terms of accountability.

  Q162  Chairman: You are the experts. You are not flagging up that there is good practice and systems that can be adopted in every school to drive a change in the system.

  Ms Gravell: We said earlier that we thought there was excellent practice out there and excellent training and advice.

  Q163  Chairman: But if we were taking evidence on teaching children to read we would have people bouncing in here to say that they had found the Holy Grail; they would say that if they were given Synthetic Phonetics, Jolly Phonics or whatever they would have the cure. You do not seem to be saying to us that this system adopted in schools in Avon produces real results and everyone should copy it. You all seem to be groping for the answer rather than knowing of any cure that is available.

  Ms Gravell: I think that I would be prepared to go out on a limb and not grope and mention the kind of things that the Children's Commissioner has recommended: the CHIPS programme and the Sheffield programme. That is one of the few that has been fairly rigorously evaluated. The common theme is that they heavily involve pupils. Ofsted says that parents also need to be involved. There is a planned response. Under that programme the training of teachers in the techniques used and the training of schools does not take that long. Very often we find that it has not happened, or has not happened for a long time, and teachers do not have the confidence to tackle problems properly.

  Dr Das: We have been hedging our bets a little bit, but if you try to break down what good practice looks like it is easy to identify some of its contours. For us, the key is communication. If there is good communication between the school, the community, parents and pupils a lot of the cases that we get will not come to us at all; the problem will be solved. I believe that communication barriers are a big problem and lead to bad practice. There are things like inter-agency and good partnership working, which is another key factor for us. There is ongoing training of staff. Another element is lack of complacency, as well as peer involvement in both the formulation and monitoring of policies. The problem is that we do not have any examples where all of these things happen in the same place.

  Q164  Chairman: Caroline Day, is there any stunning good practice that can be rolled out?

  Ms Day: From Barnardo's perspective, it does not usually work directly in schools. We have a lot of services and we may have support groups in schools and so it is difficult to give specific examples. One need that we detected was greater dissemination of good practice. From our perspective we have our own anti-bullying policy and ensure that that goes out across all our services so that all our staff are aware of that. We ensure that at organisational level we are doing the best we can to make sure that bullying of young people does not occur and it is challenged and tackled in an appropriate way. But I believe that there is some merit in having a mechanism to link up good practice so people talk about it more. As a voluntary organisation we often have pockets of practice that do not really get shared. Certainly, I think that that would be very useful given the difference between the voluntary and educational aspects.

  Q165  Jeff Ennis: We have been led to believe that the DfES provides a very small pocket of money for anti-bullying programmes. I believe that it is £1.4 million which is very paltry. Do you feel that even that small amount of money is being spent in the most useful way at the present time? Should the Department not bother or increase the amount?

  Mr Middleton: I do not know how the Department is spending it.

  Q166  Jeff Ennis: Were you aware that the DfES was providing this amount of money? That tends to indicate that at the present time it is being wasted.

  Dr Das: It has a phone helpline, so perhaps that is what takes up a big part of the resources.

  Q167  Jeff Ennis: I think a helpline would cost more.

  Ms Day: Its very useful TeacherNet website has examples of good practices.

  Ms Gravell: There is a very good anti-bullying pack.

  Helen Jones: Although we have criticised aspects of it, generally it is pretty good, is it not?

  Jeff Ennis: Mr Middleton has criticised that quite extensively in his submission.

  Q168  Fiona Mactaggart: Dr Das, I just want to pick up one matter that I thought you referred to earlier—perhaps I misheard you—about people feeling unwilling to report racist incidents and bullying because they fear consequences for their own careers and so on. Can you tell me what evidence you have on that?

  Dr Das: I was referring to schools being unwilling to report to what were called LAs but now various other bodies. Schools are reluctant to report upwards and, therefore, the problem is that no one ever gets a sense of the true picture or the scale of the problem. For instance, looking at the figures for Bristol last year in the LA reports there were about 670 racist incidents in schools. To say that that is the tip of the iceberg is an exaggeration; the problem is probably vastly greater than that. Schools have a good deal of fear in reporting to the LA because their reputation will be diminished and they will be seen as racist schools and somehow it shows them in a bad light. That is the thinking of a lot of teachers and head teachers. We do not hear of it. I think that pupils are reluctant to report for very different reasons. There is lack of confidence in the system because historically racist bullying has not been dealt with particularly well, so the school does not see very much point in reporting. Our big challenge is to improve reporting on both aspects from pupils and schools upwards.

  Q169  Fiona Mactaggart: How do you do it?

  Dr Das: For me, a big part of that answer is inter-agency working; it is about working with both the statutory and voluntary sectors in improving the understanding of school liaison officers. Police officers based in most if not all of the secondary schools have a huge lack of understanding of what racist incidents mean. Often police officers in schools will hear about racist incidents but never tell the school about it. All the parts of that puzzle need to be addressed individually.

  Ms Day: There is also one small issue that we are beginning to notice. I do not know whether it has been around for a long time and is just emerging or whether it is quite new. I refer to the assumption of what racist bullying actually is. The assumption is that it is often between white and black cultures, or white and Asian cultures. At the moment we find that there is far more of an inter-BME culture of bullying and a growing issue to do with pockets of Eastern European economic migrants across the country. It is becoming more about one's nationality rather than just one's colour or race.

  Q170  Chairman: Is there research to back the assertion that girls are as likely to bully as boys and they are becoming more physical in their bullying over time? Is that just a notion or is there research to back it up? Is there a difference between the genders?

  Dr Das: Our work does not show a significant difference. It shows that there are more male perpetrators. In some cases there is more violence and aggression where boys are the perpetrators, but in general we have not seen any significant patterns, except that girls are bullied more than boys.

  Q171 Chairman: Caroline Day, what is your view on this?

  Ms Day: Young people very much identify that it is done by both sets of young people to both sets of young people. I believe that at the moment there is difficulty in media portrayal which often seems to put girls ahead of boys. There have been a lot more cases of girls doing extreme and very violent bullying. There have been recent cases involving stabbing and matters of that kind. I think that that brings it to people's minds a lot more and implies that girls are bullying more than boys. We have had very mixed views on that. I cannot definitely say either way.

  Q172  Chairman: We are coming to the end of this session. Is there anything that you want to impart to the Committee before we finish? I do not want you to go away totally frustrated that you have not put everything before the Committee that you dearly want to put to us. Mr Middleton, is there anything that you want to add?

  Mr Middleton: One subject on which I have not touched is that autistic children may display bullying behaviours themselves because of their misunderstanding of social rules. The issue is whether or not that really can be called bullying. That takes us back to the definition of bullying, because they genuinely will not understand why they should not behave in a certain way. We need to address that potentially through things like social skills training and to work with that person on what is and what is not acceptable behaviour. Often, it will be almost a logical reaction to what is going on around them, but as soon as they are shown that something is not appropriate behaviour they will change it. It is sometimes quite difficult for schools to recognise that they might need to take that approach with that sort of person.

  Ms Gravell: We have talked about the effects on the child as a result of bullying and the potential for that child to lose out on education by being kept at home. We also have problems with parents being threatened with prosecution for non-attendance. Sometimes parents ring us about that and then we find out about the bullying problem underlying it. Another aspect that we encounter is that the child retaliates against a bully and is excluded for that response. We have dedicated exclusion help lines. In 5% of the calls parents say that the exclusion has been for that reason, so it is not an insignificant matter.

  Dr Das: I should like to make three very brief points. One is about better resourcing for the voluntary sector in terms of helping the statutory sector to deal with bullying. I think that that needs to be looked at. The second matter is to do with the school's accountability. It takes us back to the point made by the Chairman. We have a problem where often the schools will do nothing, but when we approach the LA and CYPS they say that they cannot make them do anything. It is a real bind; it does not help to improve the situation. The third matter is to do with complaints procedures. They are very arduous and act as a deterrent for parents who use them. They are sent from pillar to post.

  Ms Day: For us the aim would be to ensure that children participate in all of this, that we listen to them and use their language and work with them on what they see as bullying and the changes that they want to make, building on the whole school ethos but also instilling values in the community so that children have mutual respect and understanding for everybody. Through that we must make sure that they participate all the time.

  Chairman: I thank our witnesses for their time. This has been a really interesting and valuable session for us. If when you have gone away you think of something that you should have said to us you know where we are.





 
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