UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1103-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS committee

 

 

BULLYING

 

 

WEDNEsday 22 NOVEMBER 2006

MS CAROLINE DAY, MR BENET MIDDLETON, DR SHOBHA DAS

and MS CHRIS GRAVELL

 

MR STEVE SINNOTT and PROFESSOR PETER K SMITH

Evidence heard in Public Questions 120 - 218

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 22 November 2006

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr Douglas Carswell

Mr David Chaytor

Jeff Ennis

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Fiona Mactaggart

Stephen Williams

Mr Rob Wilson

________________

Memoranda submitted by Barnardo's, the National Autistic Society

and the Advisory Centre for Education

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Ms Caroline Day, Researcher, Barnardo's, Mr Benet Middleton, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, National Autistic Society, Dr Shobha Das, Deputy Director, Support Against Racist Incidents (SARI), and Ms Chris Gravell, Policy Officer, Advisory Centre for Education, gave evidence.

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 education authority and still not get anywhere. Sometimes the local education 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 education 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 education 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 per cent 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 - he 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. They 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.

Q140 Mr Chaytor: Does it all take place outside school hours, or are children using their mobiles during school hours between lesson times to harass and bully, in which case why let them keep their mobile phones with them when they enter school?

Ms Gravell: Sometimes they do it surreptitiously and the school is not necessarily aware that they have the mobile phones.

Q141 Mr Chaytor: But if they had to deposit their mobiles at the main office when they came to school would that not cut out a huge opportunity for cyber bullying during the hours of the school day?

Ms Gravell: We do not have a strong view on that, given that some children report the need for a phone to make them feel safe because they can call for help.

Chairman: That is a very good answer.

Q142 Fiona Mactaggart: We are also conducting an inquiry into citizenship education. In listening to what you said I was struck by a lack of clarity in schools about the rights of victims of all kinds of bullying. You contrasted the way in which victims as a result of disability were treated in comparison to those who were victims because of race, in that those dealing with them seemed more aware that rights came into play in race. Is it your view that schools which have a robust citizenship education model and recognise human rights as part of that can deal better with bullying than other schools? Does it make a difference?

Ms Gravell: I think it does. There is recent evidence from the programme run under UNICEF about rights education in schools that it really does help. Anything that increases the reasons for mutual respect, as Sir Alan Steer called it, will help, and a rights-based citizenship programme will obviously be useful in that regard.

Dr Das: I agree. I think that where there is an ethos about promoting citizenship as a good thing for the future that is something that we see generally as a more consistent and firm approach to bullying. I think that in schools where that is a strong focus they are quite creative in terms of how they handle bullying. It is not a stick-based approach. They do things to keep pupils safe. To go back to a point made earlier, it is not about excluding victims to make them feel safer; it is about giving them techniques like red and yellow cards to flag for the future when they are feeling unsafe. There is an aspect where other pupils in the classroom are also encouraged to watch out for the safety of their colleagues. There is a better ethos where there is better citizenship education.

Q143 Fiona Mactaggart: Does it reach children with autism and other disorders?

Mr Middleton: I do not know specifically about the issue of citizenship studies, but certainly we would want to see approaches to bullying going beyond just a bullying policy - something flexed in such a way that the whole school deals with issues. When schools have been thinking about their duties under the disability equality legislation they need to think about how they reflect bullying within those policies but also perhaps how to work with whole classes in dealing with bullying, particularly in relation to autism. We have found that things like circles of friends where we get a group of people to think about how it might work with and support the child are very effective. I think that to broaden it beyond bullying and thinking about how the school approaches it right across the board, particularly in relation to disability but I am sure also in relation to other areas of discrimination, is absolutely critical.

Ms Day: When we were doing our research a lot of the young people asked for better use of citizenship or PSA2 lessons. They felt that a lot of topics covered, especially those to do with sexuality or race, were always regarded as "the other". It was never directed at them as a group; it was always an issue covered outside that classroom; it would always be somebody else who was gay and this might happen, but it was never brought down to the young people in that room. It brought about the feeling that it did not really happen there and was not something that they needed to worry about; it would always be an outside issue. They felt that particularly in relation to homophobia and sexuality the issues in schools were often tiptoed around quite a lot and schools needed to address them a bit more head on. People were not worried about that and they felt that it would not encourage more bullying behaviour. One young person said that teachers were scared because they thought it might make young people gay if they made them more aware of their options and it was still choice rather than something in you from the start. They felt that if that could be brought out in schools and children could understand that the person sitting next to them was first and foremost their friend, not just somebody on the street who is gay or black or whatever, it would bring it home that much more. They also thought that in that way they could participate far more in it and wanted a greater role in what was being said in policies and within lessons. It was not just what they were being told; they wanted to look at it themselves, have their own groups, be able to address it and talk to each other and work out what is best for them rather than just have a policy that assumes what might be best for them.

Q144 Mr Carswell: Do you agree that children with special needs are quite often more vulnerable to bullying?

Mr Middleton: That is so specifically with autism because it is about the way someone interacts with others.

Q145 Mr Carswell: Do you say that children with special needs in mainstream schools are particularly vulnerable as compared with those who perhaps might be in special schools?

Mr Middleton: I do not think the research is clear on that. Clearly, bullying takes place in all environments. Our study showed a slightly lower level of bullying in special schools, but clearly bullying takes place in all environments.

Q146 Mr Carswell: What more can be done? We looked at a different report. Some parents quite rightly choose to put their children into mainstream schools. Do you think that this has created a specific challenge and if we are to have successful policies we need to do more?

Mr Middleton: I certainly do not think that that should be driven by bullying. If we talk about segregation on the grounds of race because of bullying people would be rightly horrified, but sometimes it is suggested as a response to disability bullying which highlights the distinctions that are made. We would very much take the point that it is the right school for every child, so you start with the child and the child's needs. Some children will do much better if they are included or supported in mainstream schooling and some may be better off in special schools. It is about the best environment for the child. How do you support the child in that environment, whether it be dealing with bullying or any other barriers that the child might face in engaging in that educational setting.

Q147 Helen Jones: I am anxious we also recognise that among a lot of young people, certainly the ones that I meet, there is a far greater degree of tolerance in many areas than there is among adults. I do not think we should lose sight of that. My question is: how do you build on that? We talk about bullying in relation to school discipline policies in general. Have you come across any evidence, as opposed to a general feeling, that bullying is more widespread in schools that do not have thorough discipline policies and a culture of respect, or is it simply hidden in some schools because they do not want to admit that they have it? In your experience is it also the case that if there is bullying it arises throughout the spectrum and there can be bullying of staff as well as children? All of us have a general feeling about it, but is there any concrete evidence?

Ms Gravell: In September the Guardian reported a survey of black teachers who faced bullying and racism in staff rooms. There is also an organisation called the UK National Workplace Bullying Helpline which says that teachers, lecturers and employees in education are the single largest group of callers. Obviously, it is going on.

Q148 Helen Jones: With the experience of the heads under whom I have worked I can well believe that.

Ms Gravell: We know that there are lots of cases of harassment and workplace bullying among the NUT membership that are brought to court. It is a problem throughout. I suppose that in a very enclosed environment these problems arise.

Q149 Helen Jones: All of us share that feeling. I am trying to see whether there are any hard statistics on the point.

Ms Gravell: Those are two examples of which I have experience. There are other reports of problems among staff as well as pupils in schools.

Q150 Stephen Williams: The first matter on which I want to focus is the definition of bullying. There appears to be some tension among the witnesses as to whether or not we need perhaps a statutory definition of bullying. Mr Middleton said he felt that bullying should just have a general definition and the school should deal with all types of bullying, whereas Dr Das felt that perhaps there needed to be specific policies for specific types of bullying. Do we need a statutory definition of bullying?

Mr Middleton: My point was not concerned so much with the definition of bullying as the guidance being offered to schools on how to deal with it and the fact that distinctions were made by schools in their response to bullying based on sexism, race and disability. Therefore, in terms of the definition I have no specific comment. My point was about the guidance rather than the definition.

Ms Day: When we talk about a definition it is important to make sure that young people and adults mean the same thing and that we have an understanding of language. One matter that we have noticed is that often young people mean very different things by what they say, explain things in different ways and have very different views on what bullying means to them. With it becoming quite a well used word in recent years, it is about defining what we are going to talk about as bullying. Language has evolved in a lot of areas and young people are very much aware of it. In particular, they use the word "gay" to mean "stupid" or "daft" - for example, "You wear gay trainers." "Bullying" is everything from a bit of pushing and shoving in the playground or harmless teasing right up to the extreme of physical and verbal violence. I think it is quite important to consult with young people so that they are on the same track as ourselves in understanding bullying to mean what we understand it to mean.

Q151 Stephen Williams: In the guidelines should there be strict definitions of different types of bullying, or how much should be left to the actual school to evolve its own policy on bullying?

Dr Das: We find that often schools do not struggle to identify an incident of bullying. That does not seem to be a problem. For us the problem is one of identifying incidents of racist bullying. They can see something as bullying easily enough but they do not want to put the stamp of prejudice on it because somehow they feel that it makes them look bad.

Q152 Stephen Williams: Is there not a statutory duty under the Race Relations Act to report a racist incident in a school?

Dr Das: Yes, but it does not happen. Schools are very hesitant to report it. They feel that they are black-listed for reporting racist incidents, so a lot of the work that we have done in the areas in which we have been engaged has been to say that it is good practice to report and that the purpose of reporting is to make sure that they get the support they need.

Q153 Stephen Williams: The Chairman mentioned that this was Anti-Bullying Week and the various groups within that coalition are focusing on bystanders. I suppose that "people who witness bullying" would be a better way to put it. All of us can remember witnessing bullying in school. We have the statistic that 85 per cent of children have seen someone being bullied, but there seems to be a difference among the various organisations as to how many children then try to do something about it either by intervening directly or reporting it to a teacher. How can a school have a policy on what it might expect other children to do when they see bullying, or is it something on which one cannot really have a policy?

Ms Gravell: One certainly can have a policy on it. I think that a number of schools were aware of the report of the Children's Commissioner published on Monday. That showed at least one school where there was a very well developed group of pupils which was like a bullying appeal group; that is, if other pupils had a problem as bystanders they could be backed up by others. They were not by any means anti-bullying police but they were very strong in supporting pupils who needed to do something about behaviour in those groups.

Dr Das: I am not sure that we can address the issue of bystanders by policies. I think that it has to be more about promoting a culture where people take responsibility for things that they see. I go back to the point I made earlier. A lot of children suffer bullying not just in school and in that regulated environment but also around the home. Encouragement should be given to young people to say that when they see something they have a responsibility and duty to intervene in some way. Talk them through personal safety issues because one does not want young people getting knifed for intervening in bullying. It must be that level of change which makes a significant difference.

Q154 Stephen Williams: What mechanisms do you think schools should have in place in order to encourage children to report bullying or to intervene in bullying cases?

Dr Das: Probably the solution is the one raised earlier by Fiona Mactaggart; that is, the promotion and highlighting of the citizenship education ethos.

Ms Gravell: I think there must be very flexible ways for children to do it, so there may be anonymised bully boxes, or perhaps they can talk to other pupils and report it via that route, but it is not just a question of going to a nominated teacher in a well-publicised way so that everybody can see you doing it. If one has a school that is good at involving pupils it may never need to get as far as teachers. It is dreadful but the research of the Children's Commissioner has shown that when reporting bullying and whether or not it is resolved pupils say that teachers are the most ineffective route to pursue, which is rather sad. If one can develop a culture among pupils whereby they help each other it is probably more effective than snitching to an adult.

Ms Day: Peer pressure is a huge factor in these situations. A lot of the young people with whom we have worked have said how difficult it is, either because one ends up siding with the bully because one is pulled into that group or because one is just too scared to do anything about it. Although they recognise that most bullying happens in school it is not just teachers and pupils who are there; there is a host of other support staff. The key people they mention are dinner ladies. Seeing that bullying often happens at break times and lunch times, they say that often it is dinner ladies who need to be on board to be aware of these policies, not to be prejudiced themselves or to keep a second eye out but to be aware of what is going on and, if they think that something is happening, to act on it. It is a double-barrelled approach to it.

Dr Das: Some of the best examples that we have seen of the sustainable targeting of bullying and the elimination or reduction in the number of cases arise where schools have trained pupils in peer mediation. That is another area where pupils are encouraged to take responsibility and also have the skills to do that.

Mr Middleton: In the case of autism this often goes to the heart of how one deals with it. Often a child with autism will not appreciate that he or she is being bullied. Such a child will not know the social rules. That can be quite extreme and can range from a child who is told by another boy that he will be hit every day so he believes that that is the rule to much more subtle types of bullying where the child may be led into quite inappropriate behaviour. Encouraging other children to report and support that process is absolutely critical particularly in the case of autism which is about social interaction.

Q155 Stephen Williams: I believe that yesterday the Secretary of State announced that there would be government money available for mentoring. We have not studied in depth what that means in practice. Do any of the witnesses have viewpoints about whether or not that may be effective? It seems to be encouraging people to have a greater role in tackling bullying.

Ms Day: Peer mentoring was mentioned frequently by young people whom we support. It is something that they feel they can turn to and it is a good half-way house between themselves and teachers. Some of the schools with which we work also have learning mentors; they can also keep an ear open all the time and are people to whom young people can report.

Stephen Williams: Mention was made of our inquiry into citizenship. The Committee visited a school in Somerset which had a fairly comprehensive programme of involvement by pupils and groups representing everything under the sun. Curiously, they did not have a group to deal with bullying. I asked several children about it and they said that because people were involved in so many things they did not believe that there was such a problem in the school. That was the viewpoint of the children and it might be an exception. Do you have any evidence about the effectiveness of school councils and people's involvement in tackling bullying?

Q156 Chairman: That really takes us into good practice which we cover in the third section. That is a very important point. Looking at the evidence the Committee has received, a lot of us visit schools. I certainly visit at least one school a week. Perhaps I go only to good ones, but those that I have visited have a clear, coherent anti-bullying policy which involves staff and so on. It seems to work extremely well. At the same time, the polls and research to which you allude suggest that there is a very real problem out there. There is almost a disjunction between what we have seen in a school. Perhaps the Select Committee visits only good schools and it should make random raids on them. A lot of the schools that you go to must have very good practice.

Ms Gravell: Unfortunately, we hear about poor practice mostly from the advice lines because we are dealing with parents who encounter problems. We are certainly aware of models of good practice out there and that it can be done. Our whole philosophy is that schools can make a difference and make things a lot fairer and safer for children. We would not be in this job if we did not think there was hope at the end of the tunnel.

Jeff Ennis: Before we go to good practice, I should like to go back to the type of bullying. Normally, when one thinks about bullying one thinks of it in a secondary rather than primary school setting. Is that still very much the case? Is most of the bullying still taking place in secondary schools, or is it becoming a greater issue in primary schools?

Q157 Chairman: All of the witnesses are nodding.

Mr Middleton: I do not have exact figures, but we are picking it up right across the school system. The problem is not confined to secondary schools. We are supporting parents and children who are being bullied at all ages.

Ms Day: We have evidence to show that sometimes young people feel it is worse in primary schools than in secondary schools, but they have also identified that the worst period is the transition between the two. Primary school can be quite a contained and secure environment. You have been there for a long time and you know all the people; you know your teacher very well. Moving into that much larger school where you are at the bottom of the pecking order, with all the different issues which go with that, is a real strain.

Q158 Jeff Ennis: Is there any difference in the main types of bullying in the primary as opposed to the secondary school setting, or are they very similar?

Dr Das: We see a difference. For us the split is generally half and half; it varies from year to year, but we see as much in primary as in secondary and it is across the age ranges in primary, so it is not clustered towards the top end. We find that a lot of the primary school bullying tends to take the form of isolation, for example, "We don't want to play with you because you're black", or verbal abuse, or mockery of culture. In secondary schools it tends to become a little more physical; there is more aggression and violence.

Q159 Jeff Ennis: Moving to good practice, who should decide what anti-bullying programmes are used? Should it be the DfES, the local authority or the school itself?

Mr Middleton: We are running a campaign at the moment called Make School Make Sense. We have asked people to nominate school heroes.

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 SyntheticPhonetics, 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 LEAs 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 LEA 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 LEA 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 five per cent 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 LEA 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.

Memoranda submitted by the National Union of Teachers and Professor Peter K Smith

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Steve Sinnott, General Secretary, National Union of Teachers (NUT), and Professor Peter K Smith, Head of the Unit for School and Family Studies, Goldsmith College, and Head of the Research and Advisory Group, Anti-Bullying Alliance, gave evidence.

Q173 Chairman: I welcome to our deliberations Professor Peter Smith and Steve Sinnott. You have had the benefit of listening to the previous set of witnesses. As a Select Committee we are here to learn. It is a privilege to have with us Prof Smith given his experience and range of research. We also have with us Steve Sinnott who represents the only teacher union that responded to our call for evidence. We hope that you can help us with our inquiry. I will give each of you three minutes to encapsulate what you want to tell the Committee and then we shall go to our questions. Let us start with Prof Smith.

Professor Smith: Earlier the Chairman said that he was a bit depressed about this matter. First, I think that there are two encouraging features. One is that internationally we can be fairly proud of our record in terms of what we have been doing about school bullying. Norway, Sweden, the UK and Australia are probably the countries that are doing the most in this area. I think that it is having an effect. Earlier someone said that in the main the incidence of bullying is going down, if only slowly. It is not certain because the evidence base is not perfect, but there are a good many factors to indicate that rates of bullying have been going down. There is, however, still plenty to tackle. I take that as an optimistic sign that what we have been doing over the past 10 to 12 years has had some effect, and it would be very disappointing if that was not so. But we face new challenges. Cyber bullying is a new challenge and is probably going up. During the previous session someone mentioned the immigration of new peoples into communities which may also make some things more difficult. There is plenty to do. In the previous session the Committee suggested that perhaps people were not being sufficiently forward in saying what should be done, but in a way we do not yet have the evidence base for that. Reading was given as an example, but in the past mistakes were made by over-enthusiasm to pursue certain kinds of teaching reading methods without perhaps the right evidence base. On the whole, I think that we have been doing the right thing which is to use a broad variety of approaches to see how they work. As yet, we do not have a magic bullet or pill to solve it, but a lot of things help. We really need more research and a better evidence base, especially in deciding what kinds of sanctions work best and in what situations and what peer support schemes work best. Some of these matters I mention in my submission.

Q174 Chairman: Are you saying that the incidence of bullying is going down? I ask you the question again because I note that some members of the press corps have just come into the room.

Professor Smith: The press likes stories about how bullying is getting worse, but the evidence from repeated surveys of the same type in the same place - I have cited Leicestershire as the best example - is that over the past four or five years it has been going down slowly year by year.

Q175 Chairman: And we are doing better than a lot of other countries?

Professor Smith: We are doing better than many other countries, but obviously there is no room for complacency.

Q176 Chairman: I hope that I get brownie points from the press for that.

Mr Sinnott: The Chairman earns brownie points from me if he repeats his comments about the National Union of Teachers.

Q177 Chairman: I said that you are the only teacher union that responded. Head teachers responded.

Mr Sinnott: I look forward to the day when on behalf of teachers you receive only one such piece of evidence. I am ever the optimist in these matters. For us the first priority of any school is to ensure that it deals with the welfare of youngsters. From all of our own evidence and a search of the literature what youngsters want is a school in which they feel safe. What we do know is that in such an environment they will be protected and will always learn better. This is an educational issue as well as a matter to do with the welfare of youngsters. I believe that at the moment we have a real opportunity with the development of thinking around a personalisation agenda for youngsters to take forward that issue and contribute to the task of properly and effectively dealing with bullying. We are very supportive of that personalisation agenda. I hope that this is dealt with properly in Christine Gilbert's report. There may be evidence of a decline in bullying amongst youngsters. I heard Professor Smith's earlier comment. Just occasionally in the evidence in the previous session reference was made to the bullying of teaching staff. A few years ago I think we would have had no calls to us about the bullying and harassment of teachers within schools, but we now have such calls. Evidence has been submitted to the Select Committee from the teacher support network on bullying among teachers. There is also some statistical evidence on that. We shall be producing a report on Friday, which we have already promised to send to the Select Committee, on sexist bullying in schools. That is a neglected area in relation to teachers. When we submit that evidence the Committee will see in very graphic terms some terrible stories of harassment of teachers. In relation to the type of school environment that is conducive to dealing properly with any bullying that takes place, whether it is by head teachers of teachers or teachers against teachers, youngster against youngster or teachers behaving inappropriately with youngsters, the right setting is one in which there is a welcoming of all points of view within the school community. That includes the views of teachers, parents and the wider school community and a real student/pupil voice. There is clear evidence that in those circumstances one is better able to deal effectively with bullying.

Q178 Chairman: Professor Smith, when I listened to the previous witnesses I recalled that at one stage I was a social scientist, or tried to be. What research has been done on group behaviour and why bullying takes place? Most of us will remember the novel or film Lord of the Flies where a group of boys descends into terrible violence. Why is it sociologically that if one looks at a group of children that is a very common aspect? I refer not just to group behaviour but picking on a vulnerable member of that group, for whatever reason? Why does this happen? If we understand why it happens presumably we can do something about it.

Professor Smith: Bullying is often but not always a group phenomenon. Sometimes it is just one person picking on another, but we know that half the time, or perhaps more, it is done in a group in the sense that there may be several people doing the bullying and there will be an audience as well. Some people will be around who, even if they do not join in, may be laughing or encouraging it. There are some people around who may actually be what are called defenders and may try to stop the bullying by telling the bullies to stop, getting help or at least comforting the victim afterwards. I think that an important part of peer support schemes is to encourage people to be defenders, and that is what a good school ethos should be doing, that is, empowering people to challenge bullying. Why bullying happens is a big topic. We should not mythologise bullies. Bullying is an abuse of power. One is in a powerful situation because one is stronger; one has one's mates there against a single child, or something like that, or one feels psychologically more confident. The abuse of power can bring gains at least in the short term. The bully may extort money or belongings from someone, or it may be he seeks prestige within his peer group. He appears to be a tough person and has shown that he is more powerful than someone he can torment. In particular, if the victim is perhaps someone who is not strongly liked in the peer group that group may think that that is quite funny and approve it in the wrong climate. Therefore, there are temptations to bully. Why does one give in to those temptations? It could be because of the home background. Perhaps that kind of behaviour has been modelled at home in some way or maybe the bully has been bullied at home, or perhaps that is the kind of behaviour that he has experienced. In particular, in secondary schools that is a way of getting status amongst one's peers, especially in adolescence. We have a lot of evidence that it is most difficult to work on attitudes to bullying and so on at about the 13, 14 or 15-year period - the mid-adolescence stage - when peer groups and status among peers are very important. One is a bit more distant from adults; one is in the phase of distancing oneself from adults, teachers and so on. That is when bullying children may earn the most kudos, as it were, from the peer group.

Q179 Chairman: Mr Sinnott, from your vantage point as general secretary of a very large teacher union, do you pick up on outstanding good practice that you think can be rolled out and provide an answer to the problem of bullying?

Mr Sinnott: I believe that there are very good examples of schools that deal effectively with this issue or are creating the circumstances in which bullying is least likely to rear its head. I think the examples are in schools in which people are properly involved. I am referring to schools which have effective and functioning policies which are not just policies on paper but properly identify the whole range of areas in which youngsters can suffer bullying because of issues of equality and correctly specify individually a whole range of equality issues, including disability, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and issues to do with poverty. I am referring to all of those issues properly identified in policies which are monitored and schools which audit those matters. In those schools you find that there is least likelihood of a problem. Some really imaginative ideas have been stimulated by teachers or youngsters. Mr Ennis dealt with the issue of primary schools. Some of the measures, such as the creation in schools of buddies or areas where somebody who feels he needs a friend can go and other youngsters can go, are extremely effective in creating a particular culture for all youngsters.

Q180 Chairman: Do you trust schools to do it on their own? I drew the comparison with teaching children to read and having a system. I visited a school in Skipton on Friday. They had circles where on a Friday afternoon the last thing they do is pass a crystal ball and all the children talk about what they would do if they were bullied or knew that a friend would be bullied. I do not think that that system was invented in the school; it is well known and used. It seemed to be a very powerful tool especially for five to 11 year-olds because it prepares them for knowing that bullying is inappropriate behaviour.

Mr Sinnott: Circle time is a fantastic tool by which youngsters reveal a whole range of problems, worries or concerns. I believe that that is an effective contribution to teachers being able to understand what youngsters are doing. We believe that the creation in every school of a school counsellor is an important way to identify youngsters who need to relate to an adult some of their concerns; or there is scope for other youngsters who witness bullying to report it to an adult. Sometimes a school counsellor is the appropriate person for youngsters to turn to. I think it is important for all schools to have to the resources for a school counsellor. I think that your question had different levels to it. I believe that the government should give a lead on these issues. It has done some great work on the anti-bullying charter and a whole range of issues to do with discipline in schools, because that is also linked with these issues. I believe that the government has done some terrific work in that area. We need funding streams to assist in the proper professional development of schools and give teachers the skills and expertise they need to develop programmes with youngsters. I think that those measures would help. Within local authorities there should be teams that are able to deal with behaviour and promote good practice within their areas. I believe that local authorities have a key role to play. One then has the schools and their responsibility. It is an important, key priority for schools to tackle issues to do with behaviour but in a comprehensive way. Perhaps I may give another example of how this should be dealt with in a comprehensive way. I was interested in hearing the representative from the National Autistic Society. As to bullying in relation to disability, we believe that there is some evidence to show that if schools encourage the employment of teachers with disabilities there is less likelihood of that kind of bullying in those schools. Therefore, employment practices are also important in relation to dealing with this issue.

Q181 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask Professor Smith about one issue on which we have not really touched: the incidence of bullying among different social groups. In terms of both victims and bullies, are the numbers evenly distributed across social classes, or is there some skewing towards particular socio-economic groups?

Professor Smith: There is not a lot of evidence about that. My global response is that there is not a great deal of difference; you can find bullying in any kind of community and in any kind of school that has the wrong ethos and approach. In the Sheffield project we compared schools in different areas of socio-economic deprivation. There was a modest 10 per cent effect; in the more deprived schools rates of bullying tended to be higher, but looking at the total the percentage is not very great.

Q182 Chairman: There was the traditional view - one remembers Tom Brown's School Days and Flashman - that the classic institution where bullying took place was the public school. Is that still the case?

Professor Smith: Public schools have changed a lot since Tom Brown's School Days. There is probably just as much bullying going on in public schools as in state schools, but we do not have much evidence on it because the DfES has not supported research in public schools, understandably.

Q183 Chairman: Flashman lives!

Professor Smith: It may well be.

Mr Sinnott: There is some evidence from the National Consumer Council that youngsters from social groups D and E, I believe, fear bullying in relation to clothes and how they dress and they are more aware of logos and brands and how they look. The fear of being bullied can be greater in relation to one particular social class. As a result of that it steers youngsters into a particular type of behaviour.

Q184 Mr Chaytor: Professor Smith, in your submission you call for a substantial element of training on bullying to be introduced into ITT. What is a "substantial element"?

Professor Smith: Obviously, that is open to discussion, but basically at the moment there is nothing.

Q185 Mr Chaytor: It is absolutely zero?

Professor Smith: As far as I am aware, yes. It may well be that there is some in-service training, and there is quite a lot of such training going on but it is rather haphazard. It is really a matter of chance whether one's school or local authority provides that. I believe that many trainee teachers and those in place feel that they would benefit from that sort of training. We now know a lot about bullying; we have 15 or 20 years' research behind us. We know quite a lot about the backgrounds from which bullies come. You asked about the rationale for bullying. We know quite a lot about that and about the forms it takes. We know quite a lot about the way to deal with it. None of them is perfect but a lot of them are helpful. There is a whole range of schemes, as in the Don't Suffer in Silence pack and others, so it is useful for teachers to be inducted into ways of working with pupils, having support schemes and a whole range of things that could be introduced.

Q186 Mr Chaytor: Mr Sinnott, your submission does not mention ITT at all. Are you confident that the existing arrangements work well?

Mr Sinnott: We are less than perfect. We should perhaps have mentioned initial teacher training. I support what Professor Smith said. We did mention in-service training which I also regard as a very important area. In some respects it is more important because schools can deal with that type of training collectively. The best type of professional training and development is often that which is done collaboratively. We believe that this is a perfect area for collaborative training by teachers collectively within the whole scheme.

Q187 Mr Chaytor: To go back to initial teacher training, if the incidence of bullying is declining how can you justify an argument which says that the initial training on bullying should be increased?

Professor Smith: First, I think that many teacher trainees and teachers ask for it; second, the material is there to be provided; third, although it is declining it is a modest decline and there is still a lot to do. Bullying is still going on and we face new challenges, for example cyber bullying where awareness-raising about the issue will be important to everyone, including teachers.

Q188 Mr Chaytor: Mr Sinnott, on the in-service side is there enough resource in the system to provide adequately for the needs of continuing professional development?

Mr Sinnott: I do not think there is. We find that access to professional development on the part of teachers in primary schools is declining in relation to the provision of PPA time in schools, so the opportunities for them to go outside for professional development is declining. We think that that is an important general issue. Specifically in relation to professional development and training of teachers in bullying, we believe that there needs to be separate and earmarked funding. If we say that the first priority is to have schools where youngsters feel safe then we think there should be a separate funding scheme for this.

Q189 Mr Chaytor: Given all the pressures on CPD time - at our previous inquiry into special needs the NUT argued for more time for special needs training - where would you place bullying in the list of priorities on a scale of one to 10?

Mr Sinnott: Very high; we say that it is the first priority.

Q190 Mr Chaytor: Higher than special needs?

Mr Sinnott: Sometimes they are connected, are they not? It is very high. It may be that different schools have different priorities. In some schools it may be that the priority is to deal separately with issues to do with bullying but in another school there is a need to deal with special education needs.

Q191 Mr Chaytor: In individual schools do you tend to find all teachers using the same approach to bullying? Is there a school model that all teachers are expected to follow, or is it normal to find individual teachers using their own particular approaches or picking from a range of different techniques according to circumstances?

Mr Sinnott: In dealing with it the best schools are the ones that follow a common approach, that is, the ones that have a policy and procedures to deal with it and undertake some in-service training maybe at school level. The schools that deal effectively with bullying are those where there is a consistent approach and youngsters understand what is acceptable behaviour and what is not.

Q192 Mr Chaytor: Are you confident that all NUT members can deal effectively with prejudice-based bullying?

Mr Sinnott: I think we do a considerable amount of work to raise those issues with NUT members. Are they all effective in dealing with it? The answer must be no. We still have more to do. The NUT has a responsibility to deal with these issues, but so does everybody else involved in the education system: government, local authorities, parents and youngsters themselves. As part of any rights-based approach to these things we always say that there is an issue of responsibility here for all those actors but including the youngsters themselves.

Q193 Chairman: To follow that line of reasoning, recently Lord Adonis gave evidence to us on the question of citizenship. Evidence that we heard from others suggests that what every school really needs is someone who is fully trained pre-year in being the teacher in the school who leads on citizenship. He argued that five days of continuous professional development was not as good but it is pretty good stuff to substitute. As we talk about bullying what is your opinion? Is this not what should be imbedded in the whole citizenship agenda? Do you agree that if you do citizenship training well in the school bullying ought to be encapsulated in that?

Mr Sinnott: Yes, and we also say that in our submission. Again, I believe that there was an under-resourcing in the introduction of citizenship. I think there has been inadequate access to professional development to deal with citizenship, but citizenship within a school is not just something that goes on in a lesson. In order for youngsters to have a school that deals properly with citizenship it is about what they experience within it. If youngsters in a school know that their voice is valued and welcomed in lots of ways that is one of the best experiences of good citizenship. If youngsters are expected to intervene appropriately when they see bullying and are encouraged so to do that is a great example of a school dealing effectively with citizenship.

Q194 Chairman: Do you think that tackling bullying through citizenship is the best way? We went to a school in Wales which had as it model a sort of Athenian democracy - I will be criticised for this because the Athenians did not give voting rights to women or slaves - with a forum, a school council and real involvement by students. As Mr Sinnott mentioned earlier, it said to us in effect that it did not have a problem with bullying; it did not have an anti-bullying policy because it did not arise and it was dealt with through decision. Is that the best way to deal with it?

Professor Smith: I agree with my colleague. Citizenship is a good way to bring in the general issue of bullying, as long as it is not then forgotten and it is still mentioned explicitly. Whenever I hear phrases such as "no bullying goes on here" I greatly worry because we know that in any situation it can happen; it is part of human nature, as we discussed earlier. The issue then is: when it happens are there effective procedures in place to deal with it to stop it becoming too serious, and so on? I do not believe that it should be seen in any way as an alternative to dealing with bullying but as a broader framework within which issues of bullying, human rights and the sorts of things we have talked about - disability, attitudes to minorities and so on - can be put in place. As to the role of students, discussion of the anti-bullying policy of the school is a way of involving pupils. Ideally, it should be a policy developed through the school community. Ultimately, the head teacher must have the final say, but consultation is seen as a valuable part of that, as well as taking part in the school council, peer support schemes and so on. There are many ways of involving pupils directly.

Q195 Paul Holmes: Some people would ask whether we are making too much fuss about bullying because, as you say, it is part of human nature; it is an aspect of pack behaviour. One sees it in packs of wolves and groups of chimps in the jungle. There was bullying in the nineteenth century and in the good old days of the 1930. There was bullying when I was in school in the sixties. Are we making too much fuss about it? What are the long-term effects that are more serious for both the bully and victim?

Professor Smith: I do not think that we are taking something seriously that we should not because it is a very serious issue. It is part of human nature; there is always a temptation to be a bully and abuse a powerful situation. If I can introspect, I can think of a time when I bullied someone and when I was bullied. Probably most of us can do that, but it is not desirable in a civilised society for that to be a prevalent kind of behaviour. It is horrible for the victim especially if it persists. We know of well-publicised suicides - that is the extreme - due to bullying. For every one person who commits suicide there must be hundreds who are having a really horrible time at school but have not gone to the extent of taking their lives. It can have very long-term effects. I have talked to people in their forties and fifties and also people with disabilities. For example, I did some work with people who stammered. Stammering is a disability. It is very difficult to cope with bullying if you stammer; it is difficult to respond. Immediately you start to respond you are made fun of. These people had vivid memories of being bullied 20 or 30 years ago sometimes, I am sorry to say, by teachers as well as pupils. Hopefully, that has changed a lot now.

Q196 Paul Holmes: In your written evidence to us you give specific statistics on adults with criminal convictions who have been identified as bullies way back when they were eight years old.

Professor Smith: Of course, the other side of it is: what happens to the people who are doing the bullying? There is evidence about what happens if that is not checked or changed. There is evidence from David Farrington's work as a result of his longitudinal study of London's working-class boys. They are more likely to have criminal convictions later on. Studies in Norway have also shown that. I also cite a study that we did with Kerry Cooper in Manchester which found that children who are both bullies and victims are particularly at risk. That shows up later in the workplace.

Mr Sinnott: Nobody should go to school with the fear at the back of his mind that he will suffer harassment or violence as a result of gender, sexual orientation, disability or nationality. That has real consequences for the youngster's learning and self-image and the way in which he or she can make a contribution to the school, or it will have an impact throughout the individual's career and life. Therefore, there is a responsibility on us all to tackle those things. Why should we do it? All of the evidence shows that youngsters want us to make this a priority. All the evidence - I quote Professor John Macbeth - as a result of work that has been conducted indicates that youngsters want schools to be made safe for them. Sometimes it is the perpetrators who say those things as well. One of the reasons they are bullying is that they feel that that is a way of being tough and they are less likely to be bulled and they become perpetrators.

Q197 Paul Holmes: As you said earlier, there is bullying in the workplace as far as teachers are concerned, or it can be in the print room of a newspaper office. It happens everywhere and it should be dealt with everywhere.

Mr Sinnott: Perhaps I may say something about the nature of schools. I believe that there has been a change over the course of the past 15 to 20 years which is detrimental to dealing effectively with bullying. When I was a teacher and was asked what I taught I liked to give what I regarded as the Smart Alec remark "Children". What has changed now is that the job of teachers has shifted away from teaching children and teaching subjects; there is less focus on some of the social, pastoral and emotional needs of children. We need to tackle that. The best way to tackle it is to create space within the schools for teachers to be able to refocus their work to look at the wider needs of children.

Q198 Paul Holmes: I think that you are talking in part about the pressures of the curriculum, SATS, league tables and so on.

Mr Sinnott: Exactly.

Q199 Paul Holmes: You spoke earlier about the need for school counsellors and so on, but the teacher is the one who is in contact with the kids all the time and the pay structure has shifted in recent years so that we no longer pay people to be a head of year; we now reward only teacher learning outcomes, not the pastoral side of things, so some schools appoint other people to do that. Has the fact that schools have had to move away from that side of the job been a problem in recent years?

Mr Sinnott: We resisted that because we believed in the wider role of the teacher. There are other people out there who have a say in these matters and who are not supportive of our ideas in this area. We believe that that is detrimental to our education system. To some extent we have won, because in the shift from management allowances to teaching and learning responsibilities there were those who wanted to have that pastoral role undertaken by people who were not teachers. We think that that is very damaging. We strongly believe that the leader of pastoral issues within schools must be a teacher well supported by others. But the Committee has had an influence on some of these related issues in the past. Your report on special education needs and your comments on SENCOs has had an impact and changed the view within the DfES on these issues. There a clear view that one did not need to be a teacher to be a SENCO. I think that the Committee shifted the feelings on that issue.

Q200 Chairman: Given your previous remarks, I am getting the feeling of dislocation to which I referred earlier. I go to schools and see teachers teaching. In good schools they do not say to me that they are so restricted by the curriculum that they cannot teach these matters. I see highly professional teachers teaching. There may be more pressure on teachers, but they are certainly teaching in that broader sense. Do you agree?

Mr Sinnott: You talk to teachers and I also talk to teachers. I have seen the evidence in the past. We have had too many exclusions.

Q201 Chairman: I think that there are fantastic teachers out there and you do not think so.

Mr Sinnott: I think that there are terrific teachers out there and I am very proud to represent them. I believe that there are environments within schools where we can support all the good qualifies that teachers have, but my comment applies across the system. Across the system we need to ensure and be confident that there is enough space for teachers to be able to deal with the wider needs of children than I think they are currently able to do.

Q202 Paul Holmes: Is there a clear consensus on what is the best strategy for teachers to use? When I was teaching in the late 1990s teachers were told that they should not confront, blame or punish a bully but get the bully and victim together in a non-judgmental and non-blame environment and get them to talk over the issues, for example, "Why are you encouraging people to bully you by your behaviour?" That was a matter that I and other teachers found a fairly alarming thing to be told to do at that time. Is there a consensus among experts as to how schools should do this?

Mr Sinnott: First, what happens in a school should be done in accordance with the school's policy. In my view what is effective is to ensure that the way it is dealt with meets the circumstances of the particular situation. I think that in certain circumstances it is proper for the perpetrator of bullying to be permanently excluded but that in other circumstances that would be wrong. I think that in certain circumstances to bring the bullied and perpetrator together is appropriate. I do not think there is one way to deal with that. I think that you deal with it in terms of the circumstances and the context of the school's policy.

Professor Smith: I agree with that. Clearly, there is not universal agreement on the best way to deal with bullying. I think that the three things on which we would all agree are: any incident of bullying should be taken seriously; the victim should be supported; and we should do what we can to ensure that the bullying child does not persists in that behaviour. It is the last point that is perhaps the most contentious. What are the best ways to ensure that a bully does not continue to bully? Is it some sort of direct punishment? Is it more a matter of talking to the bully and encouraging the bully to understand the feelings of the victim, or is it something in between? There is quite a lot of disagreement there. There is not a great deal of evidence to tell us in which circumstances which approach works best. I think that more research is required, but at the present time there is a range of approaches. You choose the approach that best matches the circumstances, depending on the age of the child, the severity of the incident and whether or not it is the first time or the tenth time it has happened.

Q203 Stephen Williams: You say that a school should have a range of policy options and match them to the particular bully in the circumstances rather than that the school should choose a policy to be applied in all the circumstances?

Professor Smith: That is my view.

Q204 Stephen Williams: I want to return to where we started and the declining incidence of bullying. You will have heard in the previous session the representative of Support Against Racist Incidents say that in her view schools did not report racist incidents sufficiently and so there is an under-reporting of racism in spite of the statutory duty on schools to do so, whereas in homophobic bullying there is no statutory duty to record such incidents or report them in any way. How can we be confident that bullying is going down because we do not even know the extent of certain types of bullying?

Professor Smith: We cannot really be confident because we do not have good enough data. If I may, I will expand on that in a moment. I just think that the indications at present, on the best evidence we have - not just the Leicestershire data but a number of other sources - are that it is going down slowly. We also know that interventions do help. The interventions in the Sheffield project helped, and the evaluations of other methods show that they have some effect. Given that we have been doing inspection work for 10 to 12 years one would expect there to be some impact, but we need a much better auditing base to find out what is happening both across different regions of the country and schools which try different approaches and over time, and for different types of bullying and harassment, including prejudice-based bullying. There is opportunity to do that under the Every Child Matters agenda and the joint area reviews that take place. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be very clear guidance coming from the government as to how much schools or local authorities should be reporting on the various indicators in the requirements of the joint area reviews and also from Ofsted. If most schools and education authorities annually did an audit of a lot of these indicators it could satisfy Ofsted and joint area reviews and it would also be a very useful resource for us to answer the sort of questions that you are asking.

Q205 Stephen Williams: Mr Sinnott, your submission recommends that each school should have a trained counsellor. It sounds as if you would prefer that individual to be a teacher. I just want to explore the sort of skills that that individual would need. Quite a good deal of empathy would be required to deal with somebody who has suffered racist or homophobic abuse. Do you believe that one trained counsellor in a school is enough?

Mr Sinnott: We are probably saying that there should be at least one. In some of the very large comprehensive schools one might need more than one counsellor, but I believe that the skills needed to deal with prejudice-based bullying, for example if somebody is bullied because of race, or disability or sexual orientation are similar. I believe that that person can have generic skills in order to deal effectively with those matters. They are good skills for a counsellor. The counsellor should also be in a position to lead the school on a whole range of anti-bullying techniques and policies. I think that schools can do a lot of effective work if they have school counsellors.

Q206 Stephen Williams: One of the reasons I am asking that is that, as we know from previous sessions, particularly for gay children it is quite different because they probably do not have a peer group, whereas all the other groups of children who may be bullied have some emotional support from their families or friends in similar circumstances, so if a counsellor is to deal with homophobic bullying he needs particularly strong skills.

Mr Sinnott: They do, and we would want the school counsellor to have those skills. At the same time, I refer to paragraph 74 of our evidence which deals exactly with homophobic bullying and some of the changes in the legal situation. I think that we can do a lot of work in raising the awareness of head teachers to some of the changes in the legislation.

Q207 Stephen Williams: In several submissions one finds the phrase "a whole school issue"; it is not just how to deal with particular incidents of bullying. There should be a message throughout the school that certain types of bullying are completely unacceptable, in particular racism and homophobia, and that also feeds through into the citizenship agenda. Presumably, that is something which both of you advocate.

Mr Sinnott: Absolutely.

Professor Smith: Yes. The question of the whole school policy still needs more attention and support. It has been pointed out, and is fairly well known, that about 36 per cent of school policies mention homophobic bullying. That is rather old data. We are currently looking at 140 school policies and the position is much the same. Although there are some very good policies, every one of them could be improved. A lot of them are quite deficient in some respects. For example, a good policy should give advice on what sort of sanctions the school will use. We have talked about this before. We agree that a school should have a unified approach; whatever its philosophy, there should be consensus within the school as to what it will do and the range of sanctions available, when they will be used, how parents will be involved and so on. Policies are not always clear about that. There are lots of things that should be in policies and sometimes they are and sometimes not. A good school policy will cover not just pupil-pupil bullying but pupil-teacher, teacher-pupil or possibly teacher-teacher bullying. It should be a whole school policy, not just pupil-pupil bullying. Schools may need some support in maximising the potential of their policies.

Q208 Helen Jones: We have heard a little about the problem of teachers being bullied. Does Mr Sinnott have any evidence to give us based on his experience as to how widespread that is? Is it a minor or major problem? Is there an increase in bullying of teachers by pupils, or is that one of these urban myths that we hear?

Mr Sinnott: It is being raised with the National Union of Teachers by teachers in ways that it was never raised before. If I go to a meeting somebody wants to talk about an issue about which he feels bullied by other teachers within the school and feels that that is often in relation to his or her job. As a result of some of the high stakes programmes run within our schools we are creating an environment in which everybody feels under stress. Sometimes it is the stressed head teacher or head of department who takes particular action against a teacher who then feels that he or she has been bullied or harassed. Sometimes that has found an outlet in remarks that are made by a teacher in relation to another teacher that are entirely inappropriate. For example, it was an item that was raised at our conference this year. It surprised many of us that that was one of the key concerns of teachers. If you look at the evidence produced by the teacher support network and the number of phone calls that it receives, this is a new area for many of us. We have to give particular advice to tackle these issues. It is a very important issue in the teaching of teachers.

Q209 Helen Jones: You are talking about teachers bullying other teachers, if I understand you correctly. Do you believe that that is a new phenomenon, or is it just that people are more willing to report it than they were?

Mr Sinnott: What goes on in schools is more pressurised than it was in the past. I believe that it has increased as a result of those pressures in schools.

Q210 Helen Jones: I am trying to find out if this is a real problem or just a good story. Do you come across many instances of teachers being bullied by pupils; and, if so, do you think they are adequately trained to deal with it?

Mr Sinnott: There are two ways of looking at it. There are good examples of schools being able to tackle the issue. There are lots of examples of schools behaving entirely properly where a teacher has been assaulted or bullied by a youngster or group of youngsters. I can also give you examples of ways in which schools have behaved inappropriately in protecting teachers. A teacher out on a Saturday evening sees a group of youngsters and ends up being abused and called a lesbian in front of people in the street. The school did not want to deal in a very robust way with those youngsters whom we believed should have been permanently excluded. We have to represent that teacher and say that we want a more robust response in relation to those youngsters. I can give you example after example of that type of incident.

Q211 Fiona Mactaggart: You told us about some of the characteristics of good anti-bullying work in schools, but I have not really understood whether in your view the priority should be creating a culture where bullying is diminished and is not acceptable or dealing with incidents. I have not understood what the balance should be.

Mr Sinnott: I do not believe that there is a contradiction between the two. You have to deal with both. You try to create the culture but if incidents arise you deal with them appropriately and properly. I do not see there is a contradiction in terms of how a school should react. The school has to create that culture and if an incident arises it must be tackled.

Q212 Fiona Mactaggart: Do all the teachers in a school know how to do that?

Mr Sinnott: In the best examples, yes. There are some examples where the policy is a paper one. We want to ensure that schools undertake various procedures to ensure that everybody knows what the policy is, that periodically everybody is involved in reviewing it and that the youngsters in the school are heavily involved in auditing whether or not the policy is working. Sometimes it is the auditing that identifies the problem. You think it is an effective school but the audit identifies youngsters who say that there is an undercurrent that you have not detected. One can then take some action.

Professor Smith: I agree that you need both proactive and reactive aspects to your work on anti-bullying. The proactive will be general preventive work - citizenship education and all these things - but you also need to know how to respond to particular incidents and have an agreed schedule within your school policy about how to do that, so it is not a contradiction; you need both.

Q213 Fiona Mactaggart: I suspect that all of us have been struck by your claim that the ethos of education and focus on the social and emotional life of children has diminished. In a way, I thought that that contrasted with other evidence the Committee has received from the Children's Commissioner that "using SEAL [social and emotional aspects of learning] material seems to have been positive in terms of its ability to generate empathic, pro-social attitudes and to prevent bullying." In addition, we have a government that is focusing on the ethos of schools, faith schools and things like that - the sort of matters that you say are being missed out. Do you say that the government's policy is not working?

Mr Sinnott: I think that in certain areas the government's policies have not worked, and indeed some of them have been detrimental to the proper understanding of the wider range of youngsters' needs. But what I also say - I wanted to start my evidence on a positive note - is that in my view a personalised learning agenda creates an opportunity to reflect what has gone on and the way we can identify within a school how teachers relate to youngsters and ways in which we can properly tackle these things. I believe that we are turning the corner. We will start to see ways in which the nature of what goes on in a school is less dominated by tests and league tables. I believe that there is a growing consensus that we have to move away from that culture in schools and look at the wider range of educational and welfare issues in schools, and that youngsters will benefit from a fresh approach to that.

Q214 Fiona Mactaggart: Do you think the most important thing is that children are happy, not that they get qualifications?

Mr Sinnott: I think that youngsters will be in a better position to get good qualifications if they feel happy and safe within a school.

Q215 Fiona Mactaggart: Professor Smith, you have talked about research or the lack of it. What would be the most useful piece of research to give us the information that we need to improve our work on the issue of bullying?

Professor Smith: Obviously, I must give a personal answer to that. Other people would have different views. I believe that the most useful research would be detailed case studies of particular schools looking at the kinds and range of sanctions they use and in which circumstances they are used, trying to pin down in which circumstances certain kinds of approach work best, or do not work. That is an area where there is a lot of controversy. It is very important to know what a school's reactive approach should be when it happens, and we need to know more about that. I pick that out as my first priority, but there are more down the line that I could also mention.

Q216 Fiona Mactaggart: We have talked a lot about prejudice-based bullying, but we have not talked much about bullying that is utterly unpredictable which seems to be unconnected to anything. We have heard a lot about workplace bullying. I am wondering whether somehow the focus on prejudice-based bullying may imply that there is some reason for bullying and it does not equip people sufficiently and effectively to deal with random bullying, if you like. Is this a phenomenon? I have heard about it occurring in the workplace but not much in schools. What is your view on that?

Professor Smith: I think it is good that there has been emphasis on prejudice-based bullying in the sense of bringing those particular groups into full awareness, because in the past there was insufficient awareness of, say, the difficulties experienced by gay people in school. It is absolutely right that that should be fully brought into awareness; similarly for people with disabilities and the other kinds of prejudice-based bullying. We should not neglect the mainstream types of bullying which may simply arise because somebody behaves a bit differently, or because someone takes a dislike to somebody else, or because someone is a bit timid, a bit of a swot or whatever it is. One important component of anti-bullying work is assertiveness training which helps everyone, but it could be potential victims, to know how to cope when they are provoked or attacked in some way. We all have that experience sometimes. Someone annoys us or it looks as if he or she will take advantage of us and we have ways of coping. We get some friends with us; we are assertive back to them and say we do not like what that individual is doing, and so on. For some young people that is difficult to do. These things can help. We cannot rely on that; we must also have the other kinds of actions as well: peer support and working with the bullying children. But one component is to help young people to be assertive.

Mr Sinnott: Schools are workplaces, too, for teachers and support staff. All of those people will be in positions where we have had reports of bullying and harassment. I think that it has been wholly beneficial for us properly to recognise prejudice-based bullying which includes sexist bullying. Sexism within schools is the theme of a report that we shall be publishing on Friday. The vast majority of the people who work within schools are women. I can give some tremendously high statistics relating to the experiences of women who work within schools. But it is wholly beneficial for us now to be properly aware with regard to adults and youngsters within schools that it is inappropriate to use language, whether or not in a bullying context, that is thought to be smart but which may be interpreted as damaging to people, or remarks to do with issues about race or disability as happened in the past. That is wholly beneficial in order to create an environment in schools in which everybody feels welcome.

Q217 Fiona Mactaggart: You talked about schools as being workplaces. I have encountered schools where my sense is that there is quite a bullying culture about the way that disciplinary policies are operated. That is sometimes reflected in bullying among staff which creates a sense of bullying within the school. Is that something you have encountered? How can the public, the local education authority or whatever, intervene in something which is pretty seamless and is not talked about or does not manifest itself very often? Ofsted might uncover it.

Professor Smith: I think you are right that the general ethos of the school is very important. I think that it is a matter of raising general awareness about the issue, empowering people in any position, whether it is pupils, parents, ordinary teachers or whatever, to speak out if they feel in any sense that they are being bullied, and probably other things like Ofsted inspections may also be helpful.

Mr Sinnott: The way in which in the past some male teachers in particular believed it appropriate to have discipline within the class or school worked against proper discipline across the school. A macho approach to dealing with discipline might be something that a particular male teacher could use to deal with discipline in his class, but it created a culture in which those who did not have particular characteristics were able to operate properly across the school. Some women felt intimidated by somebody saying, "I don't have any problems in my classroom", but that individual had particular characteristics which enabled him to deal with it. Effective discipline policies in schools now say that that is not the way in which they should he operating; they should be dealing with discipline in a different way. That is now old hat and there is a modern approach to dealing with discipline which is more about creating proper environments and good relationships within schools.

Q218 Jeff Ennis: Earlier we focused on the fact that if there was a well developed citizenship education curriculum in the school and a good anti-bullying policy and well run schools council in operation that would set the climate for a good anti-bullying ethos in the school. Given that scenario, do you think that the government ought to say as a matter of policy that every school should have its own school council? I asked that question of the children's minister the other day and she seemed very reticent in saying that every school should have its own school council. Do you think it should be compulsory?

Mr Sinnott: I think that every school should have it and we should ensure that we encourage it so to do. You might be interested in making a comparison between England and Wales in these issues because there is a different approach. Some great work has been done by School Councils UK on effective school councils and the way they operate, but I emphasise the word "effective". To make it compulsory is probably not the right approach. The best approach is to ensure that we convince people of the effectiveness of the school councils and that they are developing the structures that meet the needs of their individual schools.

Professor Smith: I have nothing to add to that.

Chairman: Thank you very much for this valuable session. It has been a pleasure to have you in front of the Committee.