My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 217. I am grateful to the authors of Amendment 127, which also refers to bullying. The amendments I have tabled may seem rather long but they are the result of a substantial amount of work by the APPG on Bullying and evidence from a number of anti-bullying charities, the police, head teachers, psychologists and academics, who have all given our APPG a substantial amount of evidence over the past 18 months.
It may be helpful if I remind the Committee of the definition of bullying. It is aggressive behaviour intended to cause distress or harm, involves an imbalance of power or strength between aggressors and victim, and commonly occurs repeatedly over time—not always, but sometimes. Children severely affected by it miss school for long periods, often self-excluding due to the trauma caused by the bullying. Research shows that around 16,000 a year are now out of school because they have been so severely bullied. However, provision for them out of school is woeful.
To understand, we need to go back a step and look at bullying generally and provision to stop it in schools. Any child can be bullied for their race or their special abilities and, shockingly, Scope reports that disabled children have a high level of being bullied, as do children with special educational needs and even children with medical conditions. I met a young person with asthma a couple of weeks ago who reported being bullied during an asthma attack and a young lady who, on her return to school having had a year out for chemotherapy on a brain tumour, was bullied because she was bald. This was despite the school having a whole-school assembly to explain both her cancer and her treatment.
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Unfortunately, many schools believe that they have covered themselves adequately; they have taken a model policy. Hertfordshire, my local authority, has an exceptionally good 38-page document on preventing and responding to bullying, which uses the department’s code of practice and guidelines as a starting point. The one page on which I can find any reference to supporting pupils in need of most support is all about the children remaining in school. There is nothing here that accepts that a child may be traumatised, clinically depressed, or seeking help through the child and adolescent mental health services, or that refers to what a school would do in those circumstances. That is very depressing. We do not seem to have moved on much from the excellent 2003 report by Christine Oliver and Mano Candappa at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Tackling Bullying: Listening to the Views of Children and Young People. In their conclusions, they say:
“Adults (teachers and parents) claimed that bullying was a serious or ‘bad’ thing, but pupils’ experience was that bullying was often dismissed as ‘child’s play’ … Pupils were encouraged to report incidents of bullying, but when they did, pupils frequently felt that they were not listened to or believed”.
That is what begins the spiral downwards for the child who is severely bullied. If it is not nipped in the bud, there are serious issues and some children find it very difficult to survive.
Too many schools also believe that because their provision matches the draft code of practice and the guidelines issued by the local authority, they are covered. They certainly believe themselves to be covered because they are told what they have to do to cope with an Ofsted inspection, but these children and their absence from school are often not visible. The Government are to be applauded for reissuing guidance and for funding the Anti-Bullying Alliance projects—I think that the value is about £4 million. In particular, the anti-bullying scheme under the Diana Awards, which is creating
champions in schools, is an excellent example of how cultures in schools can be changed by the children themselves. However, it is slow work; there are champions in only a few hundred schools, but there are thousands in the country.
Once these children are out of school, they need a temporary statement. That is why Amendment 217 refers specifically to that. When I first tabled the amendment I was under the impression, having talked to schools and to Ed Sykes that no such thing existed. However, DfE officials have informed me that there can be a temporary statement. Unfortunately, the majority of schools do not seem to understand that or even believe it, as I found when I went back to them to ask, “What are you doing, if you are enabled to do so?”. That is the other problem. We have lots of different bits of guidance in different places, and we now need one document that covers everything from the very positive aspects of how schools tackle what I may call, for today’s amendments, minor bullying, as opposed to those children who are so severely bullied that their learning is severely affected. When that happens, they fall under the definition of special educational needs because their condition means that they require support.
As I have already mentioned, their health is also affected. They need a safe learning environment, which is in paragraph 14 of the new schedule proposed by Amendment 217. It is extraordinary that it is clearer under employment law how to keep employees of a school safe than it is to keep children safe. It is common sense when we look down the list of policies that schools should have one relating to harassment and bullying, but the main one relates to employees. Anti-bullying does not go as far as harassment; it is all about how to get children to talk to each other, and how everything should be resolved by that.
I am most concerned by the woeful lack of alternative provision. Unfortunately, some children who are excluded from school get sent to pupil referral units. As I mentioned in a debate in the Chamber earlier this year, less than 1% of those gain five A*s to Cs. That is understandable: they are the children who are the most disruptive. They are also often the children who bully. It is ridiculous to put bullied children into exactly that environment and, frankly, we should expect a catastrophic disaster. I understand some schemes for alternative provision are being considered by the DfE at the moment. The problem is that most of them do not fit the neat funding model that you get in a pupil referral unit or elsewhere, where you expect to keep a child for at least a year in that alternative provision. The real strength of good alternative provision is that sometimes you need it for as little as two or three months before the children have recovered and can move on—usually to another school; it is rare for them able to go back. Red Balloon centres have an outstanding academic rate. Compare the less than 1% of pupils who gain five A*s to Cs in PRUs with Red Balloon, where the rate is 75% of children, most of whom have been there for less than a term.
I recognise that it may not be possible to cover the country with alternative provision for severely bullied children, but the DfE absolutely will not countenance
virtual school environments, which can provide a lifeline to isolated children—whether because they live in very rural areas or because there is no alternative provision in their more urban area. Schools of the air work exceptionally well in Australia, and electronic blended learning works well in FE and HE, so why not in schools? DfE, please reconsider. That is actually quite a cost-effective way of getting isolated children to work together.
It is time that schools were required to make their environment safer for those severely bullied children and to acknowledge when a child is so badly bullied that they need to go elsewhere. It is time that Ofsted asked specific questions about children on the roll who are out of school: no more secret deals, please, between schools and parents about keeping them on the books but not present. It is time that the Government issued a new code of tactics and guidance, all in one place, that not only helps to tackle the bullies—which is equally important—but helps the children who are so badly bullied that they cannot go to school but desperately want to continue their learning. I beg to move.