In this clip, three primary school head teachers talk about the methods they use to
help prevent bullying and create a safe environment for pupils. They explain how a good understanding of pupil relationships
and carefully planned behavioural guidelines may help to reduce bullying.
This audio clip relates to task 3 in your PDF of unit 8.
Michael Shepherd – Headteacher:
I’m Michael Shepherd, Headteacher at
Hawes Side Primary School in Blackpool.
At Hawes Side obviously, as any school, we would take bullying very seriously.
I don’t think any school would be naïve enough to say that bullying didn’t exist because, of course, bullying exists in society,
in the workplace and in schools.
What we do in school is, we make sure that the children feel safe and comfortable reporting
any incidences of bullying, or their perception of bullying, to a member of staff, or one of the peer mediators. We have children
in Year 6 trained up to work throughout the schools as peer mediators, and they go round and support other children.
We
have a respect agenda in school, and staff and visitors to school can give out respect tokens to children, and the children
have really responded very readily to that.
We recognise anti-bullying week every year, which is a national initiative,
but we call it friendship week to give it a more positive slant. Last year, we invited members of the community to come in
with children and plant friendship trees. We’ve planted a friendship forest. Every child in school was involved in planting
a tree, we brought local celebrities in, and we ran a café for 2 days for parents to come in as well, so we could talk to
parents about perceptions around the issues of bullying.
So I’d like to think that we’re a very open and transparent
school and that children have very clear lines of communication if they ever feel uncomfortable in any way.
Zoe Adams
- Headteacher:
My name’s Zoe Adams. I’m Headteacher at Westwood Primary School here in Leeds.
It’s getting to
the bottom of why the child feels they’re being bullied, and why the child who is doing the bullying is doing it, and it’s
very often not as simple as one person feeling that they’re being stronger and nasty to another person. And it can often,
it’s so complex every time, it’s understanding friendships, understanding relationships between children, it all comes down
to relationships again, doesn’t it? And the relationships teachers and staff have with the children, and the relationship
children have with each other. If you get those right, then the school’s just fantastic. And we do a lot of work directly
on teaching in PSHCE as well, so there’s a lot of work going on, on how friends should speak to each other, what’s acceptable,
what’s not acceptable, how you can show you care about somebody, how you can let them know if you’re upset by what they’ve
said. So it’s implicit in a lot of our work, and it’s also very explicitly taught as well.
We have PSHCE taught weekly
in very creative ways, so a lot of it through drama. We use drama a lot in PSHCE, and a lot of that’s to teach friendships
and relationships.
Sarah Rutty - Headteacher:
My name’s Sarah Rutty and I’m the Headteacher of Bankside Primary
School in Leeds.
Bankside Primary School is a school that serves a community of nearly 700 children now, ranging from
3 to 11. It’s challenging a school like Bankside to make sure that we have an ethos that feels just like the very small little
church Primary school that my nephew goes to where there are 64 pupils and everyone knows everybody, and it feels like a family.
That’s much harder to establish here. So in order to pull that off again is something we’ve got to be rigorous about. And
I think to ensure that children have a sense of their duty of care to their peers, and children have a sense their duty of
care to every single child, most of whom they may not know, particularly the teachers and top juniors who don’t get to know
those children until they get to Year 6.
We have to have consistent rigorous principles, so here our expectation is,
we expect the best for you and we expect the best from you, whether it’s my Deputy Headteacher or the youngest child to arrive
in nursery. And that’s really enforced by 8 Key principles which are rules for life and not just for school, that are about
owning your own behaviour, making problems smaller, not bigger, it’s about choosing your words carefully, it’s about listening,
and it’s about safe hands and feet. All those are key rules for any adult in any socially, emotionally, mature society.
And the children understand that because they’re rehearsed over and over again. So how do we deal with bullying? Any school
will have bullying. Quite often children don’t realise that what they’re doing is bullying, so the first thing is to ask the
child, what rule they’ve broken.
When a child comes to me and says, Miss Rutty, so and so has hurt me, it may be that
the first child didn’t really know that they were exhibiting what could be bullying behaviours, but when I go and ask the
child what rule they’ve broken, and the answer is inevitably, in that situation, I broke the rule ‘safe hands and feet’, they
begin to take ownership of understanding that something even unintentionally done has a consequence, not just because Miss
Rutty comes along and asks them about which rule they’ve broken, but because the other child has a feeling about that.
And
another key aspect of success I think in that, in our school is, that children again from the very earliest time are given
a language structure to express how they feel, it’s called an ‘I message’. So our children are able to tell you how they
feel or indeed, more importantly, tell the perpetrator of the terrible thing how they feel.
It would go like this, you’ve
come to me, and you’ve said, “I’m upset because Abdul’s hurt me”. We go and talk to Abdul, I ask Abdul what rule he’s broken,
Abdul understands now that there is a consequence to something that he’s done and then you would give Abdul an ‘I message’,
you’d say, I felt – “sad”, “upset”, “hurt”, when you – “hit me”. I would like you to – “say sorry”.
And then the problem,
as we say at Bankside, the problem is made completely small, and the other key rule about this is once the problem’s been
dealt with, it’s put in the bin and it stays there. Because one of the greatest problems I’ve seen in other schools is that
the problem is dealt with by nice Mrs Tidy at lunchtime, and then what happens is, little Ashleigh gets the problem effectively
out of the metaphorical bin, and drags it in to Year 3 History, and it starts all over again.
So the children need to
know that once it’s dealt with, that’s it, it’s dealt with, it goes in a bin, and we don’t get things out the bin, do we?
