Safeguarding Podcast – One Kind Word with Martha Evans, Director Anti-Bullying Alliance

In this Safeguarding Podcast with Martha Evans, Director of the Anti-Bullying Alliance: The Children’s Code and how it might impact cyberbullying, the impact of COVID on cyberbullying, ABA’s Agreed Policy Recommendations, Marcus Rashford, Anti-Bullying Week and One Kind Word, the 12,000 children reallocated schools due to bullying and the need for a Government-led Annual National Bullying Survey.

There’s a lightly edited transcript below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.

Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast with Neil Fairbrother, exploring the law culture and technology of safeguarding children online.

Neil Fairbrother

A lot of water has flowed under the safeguarding bridge since we started the SafeToNet Foundation’s Safeguarding Podcasts in February 2019. We’ve had the UK’s Online Harms Whitepaper, a global pandemic with society-wide lockdowns and the first draft of the UK’s Online Safety Bill amongst others. So it’s high time we revisited cyberbullying and bullying, and to bring us up to date on these issues, I’m joined once again by Martha Evans, Director of the Anti-Bullying Alliance. Welcome back to the podcast, Martha.

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Thanks, it’s lovely to be on again.

Neil Fairbrother

Can you give us a brief resumé, Martha so that our audience from around the world has an appreciation of your background and experience?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Sure. So I’ve worked in the children’s sector for about 15 years and, and in the Anti-Bullying Alliance since 2013. I joined ABA in 2013 when I was working on a program that was looking at reducing disablist bullying, bullying of children with SEN and Disability, and I’ve never left, I absolutely love it! So it’s a real big passion of mine.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. And for those that may not know, what is the Anti-Bullying Alliance, or the ABA is as you just called them?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

So we’re a coalition of 150 organizations, from big children’s charities like the NSPCC and down to kind of smaller grassroots charities, lots of anti-bullying organizations. And we come together with one aim, which is to unite against bullying and to speak with one voice, to try and reduce bullying and improve the lives of children and young people.

We’re based at the National Children’s Bureau, and we have three key areas of work. The first is Practice Improvement, so improving the way that the children’s workforce professionals work with children on bullying. Improving Policy and working with government to improve policy. And finally Campaigning, one of our biggest campaigns is Anti-Bullying Week.

Neil Fairbrother

And what is Anti-Bullying Week?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

So Anti-Bullying Week is a time in the calendar, it’s always the first week of November, and we come together to talk about an issue around bullying. We work with young people to set a theme, and we know about 75% of schools in the country work on Anti-Bullying Week and hold Anti-Bullying Week in their school. It’s a real big chance to highlight bullying and to talk about the ways that we can prevent and respond more appropriately to bullying in school.

It always starts with Odd Socks Day, which is the first day of Anti-Bullying Week. And we work with Andy Day, who’s a children’s TV presenter, and his band, Andy and Odd Socks. And we ask particularly younger children to go to school in their odd socks to celebrate what makes us all unique.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay, thank you for that background. Now, this podcast is quite timely as it happens because yesterday, the Information Commissioner’s Officer’s Age-Appropriate Design Code was launched. What do you think that that might achieve in the context of cyber-bullying in particular?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

I think it’s really welcome. I think we had Baroness Beeban Kidron talking about it yesterday saying that actually what we’re trying to encourage companies to do is to take the business module away from children and young people so that we’re not targeting children and young people in the business respect. So it’s actually holdin g companies to account and encouraging them to make changes.

So we’ve already seen something that we’ve been asking for a long time, which is Tik-Tok for example, saying that they’re going to ensure that when children sign-up, so people under the age of 16 sign up, that their profile is set as Default Private, which means that they’re instantly protected. And we’ve been asking for that for a long time.

And this has come about because of this Code, that’s about setting a standard and really trying to get Safety-by-Design and making sure that companies are really thinking about protecting children before they become multi-billion pound companies. And so we’re trying to kind of encourage companies to see that they can make changes to keep children safe and that they can encourage better behaviour online. I think, I think this Code will go a long way in helping to do that.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now, we mentioned COVID in the introduction and have you seen any impact on bullying in general and cyber-bullying in particular, that COVID-induced lockdowns and schooling from home has had?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

It’s hard to say because we don’t have huge amounts of data yet, but what we’ve seen through our research and other others’ research, as well as speaking to young people, is that we’ve definitely seen an increase in cyber-bullying during the lockdown period. We saw a reduction in face-to-face bullying last year during lockdown. Those things are to be expected because children were spending a lot more time online and weren’t going to school face-to-face, but there are some other issues that have come about that have been quite interesting and things that we certainly need to act on.

For example, online lessons, what we saw was children often bullying each other over chats and schools not always knowing how best to kind of address that issue. We also saw quite a lot of reports of loneliness amongst children. So actually some children at school were kind of forgotten about, and we’ve heard a lot of children that were being bullied, who actually quite pleased to not be going to school anymore. And then those children then becoming quite lonely because they weren’t being in the WhatsApp groups. They weren’t being asked to get on Roblox. They weren’t having those kinds of interactions, so loneliness was a big, big issue.

We saw a lot of fear about returning to school and children talking about not being sure whether or not their friendships were going to still exist or being worried about bullying they might experience.

And we did quite a big piece of research into the wellbeing of children and young people. And we had some data from during lockdown, which we could compare to before lockdown and certainly wellbeing had suffered among children and young people. It was slightly worse than it was outside of lockdown. And so we want to make sure that we’re continuing to look at that, to see whether or not that levels out or what more we should be doing.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you recently published what you refer to as your “Agreed Policy Recommendations”. Who are these aimed at and what is their purpose?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yep. Since there are our Agreed Policy Recommendations, as you say, that we’ve agreed with our Advisory Group and our Core Members of the Anti-Bullying Alliance. So as I said, we’ve got a membership of 150 organizations and around 60 of them count for Core Members. And they’re people that have got their organization’s remit specifically around bullying and they have inputted into these recommendations that we’ve all agreed. The aim of them is to take them to government and to make sure that government are hearing what’s needed in terms of policy. And so hopefully they will hear us and make some of those changes.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now there are 20 recommendations, I’m not sure if we’ll have time to cover them all, but let’s give it a go. The first two do in fact refer to COVID. So Recommendation 1 is “We should be monitoring levels of wellbeing and bullying as normal school life resumes” and Recommendation 2, is that “Schools need guidance about how to maintain friendships during online lessons while also preventing bullying”. And you sort of alluded to some of this already in what you said. So can you guide us through these two recommendations?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yeah, sure. So we, as I said, we don’t have a clear data set about wellbeing or levels of bullying of children and young people, but we do have some indicators. We really need to have that clear evidence about what’s happened to children to make sure that we know what we can do to address it. That’s why that first one is there, because if we don’t have a benchmark to assess, we can’t work out what we need to give to children and young people. But obviously the indications that we’ve had is that wellbeing has certainly suffered during lockdown and levels of bullying, and children’s friendships have changed.

So in Anti-Bullying Week, we did some research, a poll actually, of young people and we found that the number of children saying that they had one friend or more had dropped quite a bit during lockdown, and we know friendships are protective factor in terms of whether or not you’ll get bullied. So we really need to be monitoring how we can maintain friendships in case, and hopefully not, but in case we do have to lock down again. How can we maintain these friendships online? How can we make sure that people are still connected whilst being at home? And I think that those what those first two recommendations are about.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay, thank you. Now recommendations 3, 4, and 5 refer to “Children who are especially at risk of bullying”. Who might these be? What type of child?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yeah. So there are some groups that time and time again research shows are much more likely to be bullied. By far the most likely are children with SEN and Disability. Often lots of the research points to about twice as likely to be believed than other children.

Neil Fairbrother

And what is SEN?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Oh, sorry, a Special Educational Needs, so SEN and Disability and that counts for about 20% of the school population, so we are talking about quite a large group of young people. Children on free school meals tend to come out time and time again at being at high risk of experiencing bullying. Same goes for young carers. Looked-after children or children who have been in care or who are care-experienced. Children who are, or are perceived to be, LGBT are often much more likely to experience bullying. And then research shows there’s some race and faith minority groups that are more likely to experience bullying, particularly gypsy, Roma, traveler communities, mixed race children, young people and immigrant and refugee children and young people. And then children with facial disfigurements are often more at risk as well.

And so whilst the approaches to reducing bullying are very similar amongst all children, and the reason that children are bullied is not inherently because it’s something about them, it’s actually about the school community and the experiences that children have as a whole it’s important to keep an eye out for those particular groups.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you mentioned free school meals and these made the headlines last year with the campaigning led by the British professional footballer Marcus Rashford, as Marcus was campaigning for free school meals for those that need them. Has that inadvertently drawn attention to this group of children that then consequently get more bullied as a result of receiving their free school meals?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

So, yeah, so the campaign around free school meals has been really positive that Marcus Rashford has done, but it hasn’t necessarily highlighted the issue of bullying, and there hasn’t been a huge amount done in the anti-bullying sector relating to bullying of children on free school meals. And it’s not often talked about actually, so I think there’s much more that needs to be done and we’re certainly going to be making a much bigger noise about it in the coming years about children on free school meals.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Recommendations 6 and 7 cover cyber-bullying specifically and Recommendation 6 says that “…we urgently need an introduction of duties for social media companies to safeguard children and young people from harmful content, cyber-bullying, and better quality of reporting about their handling of reports of bullying and harmful content”. And we know that the first draft of the Online Safety Bill does introduce a Duty of Care with Transparency reporting as well for social media companies. So does this represent job done?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

No. When it’s introduced it will definitely go a long way to helping and we’re really pleased that we’re seeing some movement on this and we’d like it to be done as quickly as possible so that we can get some more measures in place.

We speak to young people and look at what companies really need to do. There’s a kind of three-pronged approach that we think that should be taken. So we really want to see companies utilizing their technology to be able to keep children as safe as possible, so keyword searching, new ways of blocking and muting people and being able to, you know, use that the technology that is constantly adapting to keep children as safe as possible and doing that at the design point. So the safety by design code is really important. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is about encouraging behaviour online, so encouraging better behaviour. So for example, this Anti-Bullying week, our theme is “One Kind Word”. We really want to talk about kindness in a new way and really reframe kindness, and talk about how can we have an argument with somebody that’s kind? Is it possible to have a kind argument with somebody? Can we disagree with each other and not resort to insults and personal insults? And how do we encourage people to be able to do that and to give particularly children the tools to be able to express themselves and do it kindly? I think that’s one area that companies should really be looking at.

And then the third is that we’re never going to completely eradicate bullying, whether it be in school or on home to school transport or online. We always need to have the resources to be able to act quickly and know how we’re going to act when bullying reports do happen. And what we found is a real difference in how companies deal with reports of abuse online. And so we’ve seen some examples of good practice and things being taken down very quickly, but more often we hear that things aren’t acted on as quickly as possible, that people make reports and don’t know what’s happening with those reports and content remains up. So those are the kind of three areas that we want to see companies working on.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Recommendation 7 says “…implementation of the new RSHE curriculum needs to ensure that teachers fully understand the online world that young people face today”. A couple of quick questions on that one. What is RSHE and when you say that teachers need to fully understand the online world that young people face today, what do you mean by that?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

So from this new term, the government has set out its new curriculums that are called Relationships, Sex and Health Education, and it has a primary and secondary school focus. And you can see on our website, there’s a list of all of the bullying-related and relationship-related elements of that out there. But a lot of it includes how do we reduce bullying both online and face-to-face, how do we encourage better relationships? So this new curriculum is a really great opportunity to get talking about some of these issues with young people.

We did some consultation last year with young people asking them how they felt teachers did when they talked about online safety and what we heard was some really good practice, but also that they often felt that it was very obvious when teachers didn’t really know about what they were getting up to online.

So if they were talking about Facebook and you know, what TikTok was, or, you know, they weren’t always completely clued up with what young people were doing. What we found was that actually some of the best ways of delivering online safety teaching is about really taking the lead from young people and finding out what they like to do online, finding out what they do, because often what you’ll find is that they won’t tell you what they’re getting up to online, but if you go into school and say “Put your hand, you’re not going to get into trouble, but put your hand up if you’ve got a TikTok account”, the number of children will put their hand up will always surprise teachers.

So they are all online and what we really need to be doing is to be getting them to be telling us what they’re doing online and creating those kinds of environments that mean that young people can tell you what they want to do online, and then giving them the tools to be able to keep safe. And so yeah, we really want to encourage kind of more children’s voice within the new curriculum.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Policy Recommendations 8 and 9 cover mental health and wellbeing. What do you mean by wellbeing?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

So wellbeing is really the state of being comfortable, healthy, and happy, essentially. That’s how it’s defined and what’s really important about that is it’s not just about happiness. It’s about how content you feel and satisfied you feel with your life. So it’s that kind of state of contentment. So it’s a combination of feeling good and functioning well in life.

Neil Fairbrother

Now you’re pointing out here that the government has expressed a desire to train designated mental health leads in every school in England by 2025, which sounds like a great idea, but who are these people going to be? If teachers haven’t already got more than enough on their plate, then this will surely give them more than they can possibly cram into the school day?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Hmm. I really understand that fear. But the idea is that these leads are going to be responsible for the school’s approach to mental health. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be diagnosing children or, you know, going round and providing lots of counseling to children. What it is about making sure that schools are great opportunities to be able to find out early when children are struggling and being able to signpost them to the right places.So it’s really about making sure that a school has a good quality approach to mental health, can pick up early when children might be struggling and know how to signpost them to the appropriate support.

And that’s what the intention is of these leads. And so the government’s intention is to have, as you say, to have a trained lead in every school by 2025 and this coming year, they’re funding, I think it’s 7,800 schools to have the training for that lead. And I think what they’re doing is giving schools a set amount of funding and providing them with a preferred list of trainers essentially to go out and get that training, to make sure that they are implementing the right approach in school.

Neil Fairbrother

Recommendation 8 does say that “…designated leads for mental health in schools and mental health teams should have bullying sitting under their remit and should receive anti-bullying training”. Where does this currently reside if it’s not under these mental health professionals?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

So it doesn’t exist at the moment. Now I find schools with best practice will have designated leads who are leading the school’s approach to bullying, and it really should be somebody relatively senior. But at the moment, there is no requirement to have that at all.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. And Recommendation 9, a little bit of detail on there. It says that “GPs and other health professionals should be provided with up-to-date and accurate information and training relating to how to deal with children and young people who disclose experiencing bullying to them”. Presumably this is more than the “Just ignore them and they’ll go away” approach?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yeah, definitely. So what we find is that often GPs in particular would be the first people to hear about the bullying that a child’s experiencing. And they might go with some, you know, unexplained illnesses or mental health issues and actually disclose that they’re being bullied. And so what we really want is for GPs and other health providers to know how to sign post to appropriate places of support, sources of support, and also to empower people to feel that they can go and speak to their school, to find out how the school can intervene in reducing the bullying.

Neil Fairbrother

Recommendations 10, 11, 12, and 13 are all about accountability. Recommendation 10 says, “…ensure that all parts of the school system, including independent schools, academies and free schools are bound by the same core legislative framework around bullying”. And here you point out that “current legislation requires anti-bullying measures to be communicated to people’s parents and staff at least once a year” But once a year seems to have become the default. Is that good enough?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

No, I definitely know what we find is that the research shows that that schools with a whole school approach and a good ethos about how we treat each other, are the schools that do the best to reduce bullying. Once a year certainly isn’t enough. If for example, you have that one lesson that you get pulled into that’s about bullying that’s really not going to cut it and reduce bullying. What we find is that schools that have the best approach is that they talk a lot about bullying. They talk about how we treat each other and have a strong ethos that’s modeled and reviewed regularly and discussed with children and young people.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you also point out in this section one of the impacts of bullying, which is that “it is estimated that some 12,000 children are moved to different schools due to the bullying that they experience”. Which is an astonishing number. Is this another form of victimization? And does it even work anyway? Because of course cyber-bullying knows no geographic boundaries.

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Absolutely. It’s a shockingly high number. It’s something that we hear about a lot, and I know that our members hear a lot about children being moved due to bullying. It’s a failure of school each and every time a child has to be moved due to experiencing bullying. That school move has a significant effect on a child and their families and so what we find is that there does need to be accountability when this happens. So when a child is so severely bullied that they can no longer go to school and their mental health is suffering so much, there really does need to be accountability, somebody saying, how has this happened and how can we make sure it doesn’t happen again? So even if that child does have to move that the school is asked questions about how we can make sure that this never happens to anybody again.

Neil Fairbrother

We do have a system of school inspection in the UK run by Ofsted and Recommendation 13 says “…school absence records should record bullying as a reason for children being absent from school” and that “…the Ofsted inspections should be triggered when these absences are high”. What is Ofsted’s awareness of bullying and what is meant by “these absences are high”, is there a threshold number of absences that are indicative of a problem?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Every year schools have to report levels of absence, and they put it into various categories for reason and one of the largest reasons that is cast is “Unauthorized Absence”. And so an absence where we don’t know what the reason is as to why they’ve been absent. We suspect that quite a large group of those of those unauthorized absences will be due to bullying, but it’s not recorded. And so, because we know from research that Red Balloon did a while back looking at how many children were missing school every day, due to bullying, they estimated, I think it was 70,000 children where bullying was a contributory reason as to why they were off school. And so it’s a really large number of children missing school every day, but we don’t have that recorded anywhere.

So we want to see that recorded. And then when those reports of absence due to bullying is high, we want Ofsted or a local authority to be looking at why that’s the case and going into schools and really challenging schools and saying, how is this happening? And what can we do to support you to improve that? We think it would be really helpful lever.

Neil Fairbrother

Now Recommendations 14, 15, and 16 refer to a “whole school approach”. You’ve mentioned the whole school approach a few minutes ago. What do you mean by a whole school approach?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

The whole school approach for anti-bullying is cohesive Collective Action that’s required by the entire school community that’s been strategically constructed with school leadership to reduce bullying and to respond to it appropriately. So it’s really looking at the entire school community and making sure that there’s a real cohesive approach to bullying that is understood by everybody. So that includes your lunchtime staff, your after school staff and companies that you might commission after school, home to school transport, all of the areas that children might come into in their school life, it’s a real shared collective approach to reducing bullying.

Neil Fairbrother

You’ve pointed out in this section that teachers are not currently required to undertake any anti-bullying training as part of the initial teacher training process, or course, or qualifications. I presented to a group of newly inducted trainee teachers at a very well-known teacher training establishment in London and there was an hour given over to bullying awareness in general, and I had 10 minutes to present on cyber-bullying. Is this a fairly typical of the training that trainee teachers have?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

It is unfortunately, and I think, you know, you could cover a lot in an hour but there’s no requirement to have that. And so a lot of the time, you know, just understanding what bullying is and what it isn’t, isn’t covered. So we really would like to see, you know, considering bullying affects up to 40% of children in a previous year alone, and it’s such a big issue for teachers, we really need to see them having a good understanding of what bullying is and some of the key approaches to reducing bullying as part of their initial teacher training.

Neil Fairbrother

And this goes beyond the immediate staff within the school, because you say that “… schools are not required to have lead members of staff or governors responsible for their anti-bullying strategies”, which seems quite astonishing.

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yeah. So there’s no requirement to have any of that done, but we think it would be very useful. And we know that lots of schools are doing it because, you know, they know that it’s the right thing, the right approach. But we’d like to see that firmed up so that you’d have a lead role such as like a SENCO, would exists that there would be somebody who would be responsible for looking at bullying levels and supporting that approach to reducing bullying.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. And a SENCO is?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

A SENCO is a Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator and they are legally required in every school to look at the school’s approach to supporting children with SEN and Disability.

Neil Fairbrother

Well, that’s an interesting model to base that on. How might that be applied to governors? Who would do that training for them and how might that be financed, do you think?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Ah, that’s a good question! I’m not sure how it be financed, but that’s why we were talking about looking at the mental health leads in schools and that we’re providing all this training and we’re saying because mental health and bullying is so intrinsically interlinked, that we think that there’s a great opportunity within this mental health leads in schools training to include bullying as part of that remit, to be able to say that bullying is covered as well within that. So, you know, we’d hope that it would be covered in this, but I don’t think at this point it was going to be.

Neil Fairbrother

Recommendation 17 focuses very much on the curriculum itself. And it says that “…we would like to see teachers and schools adequately supported to meet the requirements of the new RSHE curriculum in a manner that is to a high standard and inclusive. Government should ensure implementation of RSHE remains high on their agenda”. Should a whole curriculum approach be taken, and this vital topic not just confined to RSHE?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yes, absolutely. Young people would tell us, you know, where it’s Anti-Bullying Week, so we’re going to go into our half an hour assembly that covers bullying and then we’ve ticked a job and we’ve done bullying this year. Actually, what we find is the best way is looking at how you can really spread the messages around anti-bullying and how we should treat each other throughout the whole school curriculum. So each Anti-Bullying Week, when we develop our school resources, we make sure that we include ideas about putting the anti-bullying message within your maths lessons or putting them within your science lessons. How can we go about looking at those kinds of things, looking at drama and how we can use the messages there? You’ll get a much better approach and it will be much more effective doing it that way, weaving it throughout the whole curriculum.

Neil Fairbrother

Recommendations, 18, 19 and 20 refer to evidence and data. Recommendation 18 is very interesting indeed, because it calls for an “annual national bullying survey”, and that seems to be such an obvious thing you kind of think it was already in existence. But plainly it isn’t. How might this work and what might it achieve?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yeah, so we used to have a national data set in the “noughties”, but we haven’t had one in a long time. And so lots of our members and us have done our own surveys. So we have a wellbeing questionnaire that we’ve had about 25,000 people do in the last year. And we know other organizations that are members of ours like Ditch The Label do their own anti-bullying surveys. But what we really need is a consistent approach that should be led by government that looks at levels of bullying and wellbeing amongst children and young people, that’s done annually that we can see, we can break down into groups of who’s more likely to be bullied so that we can really have a good picture of what’s happening to young people. And it needs that consistent benchmark would be very helpful. And you know, we’re looking across the four nations, I’m talking about England particularly today, but it’s something that we’d really like to see across the four nations of the UK

Neil Fairbrother

Recommendation 19 says that “…the government should consider a duty on all schools and academies to record monitor and review all bullying and harassment issues, including assessing the impact of the effectiveness of the responses”. Is this schools marking their own homework?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Yeah. I can understand that might draw that kind of conclusion, but actually if schools don’t know, and aren’t required to know and understand what levels of bullying are happening and aren’t being told how to do that effectively, then we haven’t got anywhere to go basically. If you don’t know what’s happening in your school, you can’t make any changes. So what we find is that we often go into school and teachers will tell you it’s one way, and then when you speak to the young people, actually that’s not completely the case.

So what we want to do is to really guide schools and how they can effectively record and monitor levels of bullying. And it’s really important for them because sometimes these cases can go on and kind of be extreme and lead to extreme circumstances. And schools really need to be able to evidence what they did and how they approached that experience of bullying. So it’s really important for schools as well to have that understanding.

And so, for example, in Northern Ireland this year, so just coming in now, they have got a duty to record levels of bullying that’s taking place, which is a new duty in Northern Ireland. So we’re keen to see how that will help and look at how we can potentially apply that here as well.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. And the very final, the ultimate recommendation, Recommendation 20 says that “…the government should conduct research into the most effective strategies for preventing and responding to bullying”. And the obvious question there is, are these not already known? But also, there is a financial cost to each school for managing and handling bullying instances, each one might take weeks if not months to resolve. So are these most effective strategies not already known, given how much research has been done into this problem?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

There was some research done in, I think it was 2013, by Dr. Peter Smith from Goldsmith’s University into the effective strategies and looking at really doing a big piece of research commissioned by government then to look at what works and what doesn’t in responding to bullying. And so there is some things known, but nothing really very recent that that government has led on.

We do every year, what we call our “Focus on Bullying”, which actually Peter Smith pulls together as well with his colleagues at Goldsmiths, and it looks at what the research is showing. There is a considerable amount of research that happens about bullying each year, but it’s not really very widely publicized, and we need to really look at what is effective and what isn’t.

There’s really different ways to ask children about their experiences of bullying. So from one survey you might have children being given a definition of bullying and then saying, are you’re being bullied? Or it might get no definition of bullying and ask children whether or not they’ve been bullied. The way that these questions are asked can give you really different results. So we’d like to see some government commissioned research into what is effective in terms of preventing and reducing bullying.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. What’s next Martha, for these Recommendations and indeed for the Anti-bullying Alliance?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Well, we want to make a big noise about them, which is why it’s so great to speak to you now, to really make a noise about what these recommendations are and to highlight the issues, particularly around the issues of training for teachers and the opportunity for mental health needs in schools and the Online Harms Bill. So we are looking constantly at opportunities that we can try and influence government to influence policy, and also to really make a noise about some of these issues and improve the way that schools and other companies will support children in relation to bullying.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. And where can these policy recommendations be found?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

They could be found on our website in the about us section. And our website is www.anti-bullingalliance.org.uk.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Well, I think we’re going to have to do an end to our discussion there, Martha. Thank you so much for bringing us up to date on all things to do with bullying and cyberbullying in particular. It’s great to catch up with you and I wish you all the very best for Anti-Bullying Week. And just a reminder, when is Anti-Bullying Week this year?

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

It’s from the 15th to the 19th of November. So not very long now, I think it’s about 60 odd days and probably even less when this goes out. So get ready. It’s all on our website!

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Thank you so much, Martha.

Martha Evans, Director, Anti-bullying Alliance

Thank you.

 

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