Anti Bullying Week – November 2020
At Elangeni this term, we have prioritised anti bullying as a whole school focus to review our policy and practice and ensure every member of our school community is committed to reducing bullying incidents in our school. We have signed up to the ABA’s All Together Project so as a school have a baseline audit and will be reviewing this alongside our action plan and survey in February 2021.
The Anti-Bullying Alliance and its members have a shared definition of bullying based on research from across the world over the last 30 years.
ABA defines bullying as:
“the repetitive, intentional hurting of one person or group by another person or group, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power. It can happen face to face or online”
Understanding patterns of behaviour and roles individuals play in bullying incidents helps us to recognise and address this in the behaviour of our pupils.
Pupils have participated in the well being survey created and analysed by the Anti Bullying Alliance and we plan to repeat this annually. Data collected is anonymous and we can see trends in year groups and classes for staff to address in their subsequent PSHE lesson planning.
Year 5 and 6 pupils looked at our Anti Bullying policy and have made suggestions to further improve it. Our updated policy will be on the website as soon as all amendments have been made.
All classes recognised that each class/year group needed their own anti bullying box and these are already in place. We have also added an online reporting form to the pupil page of our school website so pupils can report incidents at home should they need to.
School Council reps from each class have met with Miss Burns to discuss the findings of the work their class have undertaken during this week. They are also helping her understand what they mean by stricter consequences for those who show bullying behaviour.
The children have all worked hard with open, honest discussions surrounding bullying both in school on online. One of the most remarkable outcomes to date is that the pupils here seem to recognise that they have the most important part to play in ensuring bullying is not a feature of our school life. Your children/our pupils know that by refusing to
tolerate bullying behaviour ring leaders will find no audience. The other main outcome that seemed to be shared across the whole school is that we need stricter consequences
181 pupils signed up to complete the ABA Well being survey and 141 completed this questionnaire online. We will be inviting those who participated to do so again in February 2021. Below is an overview of the whole school results as percentages. Class teachers are able to look at their class and year group data to see areas which need particular attention.
Our boys appear more vulnerable to bullying and other antisocial behaviours than our girls. Teachers will be pursuing areas of relative concern including the 23% of our pupils who do not feel they belong at school. It is clear we have many beautifully behaved pupils but there are some pockets of behaviour that need addressing as well as some pupils who do not feel as content as we would like.