“(The SHEU survey) was very, very useful. It gave us reassurance we weren’t missing a trick. For example not many pupils in the sample year groups were taking illegal drugs, which re-enforced our opinions. But the survey also raised issues and flagged some things up. We discovered that some of our girls weren’t eating enough – the percentage of girls in our school not eating lunch the day before the survey was higher than the county average. There were other concerns too, specifically around cigarettes, alcohol and attendance.
The school used this data and took a number of actions to address it. More female peer mentors were put in place and the school asked NEXUS (the Extended Schools service) for help, so they developed a programme for girls which addressed their eating patterns, healthy eating, sex education and self-esteem issues.
We ran an anti-bullying group for Year 9 as a preventative measure, based upon data provided by our current Year 10 students.
The travel data revealed that a high number of pupils took the car to school so we involved the BIKE-IT scheme who ran assemblies, brought in their bikes (including one with a pedal-powered smoothie maker!), and raised awareness of health and green issues.
The information about how happy the students were with their lives raised some concerns as far fewer girls were as happy as the boys, so work was done around developing aspirations, role-models and self-esteem."
Bullying: turning the curve at last?
Bullying: turning the curve at last?
For over 15 years, we have been asking secondary pupils across the country the same question: Do you ever feel afraid of going to school because of bullying? The pupils are offered four responses, Very often, Often, Sometimes and Never. The proportion saying anything other than 'Never' veries between 20% (Year 10 males) to over 30% (Year 8 females). And it's been that way for a long while.
I have struggled to understand for a while why our bullying figures are so flat. For the last decade and more, schools have made more and better efforts to address bullying, and the list of initiatives and strategies we have seen is long (see, for example, https://www.antibullyingweek.co.uk/ ). Yet for all these efforts, the figures on young people's feelings about safety at school have been stubbornly stable, neither going down nor up.
That's actually the least expected result. We would obviously like to see a fall in young people's fears of bullying at school, although we could also imagine that figures might go up, as young people become more aware of it, and/or more inclusive about what they think of as being 'bullying'.
However, our most recent set of charts shows some evidence of change, at last, and the change is in a very desirable direction.
We see falls in all four groups, consistent over the last four years or so. Our usual health warning is, we survey with clients in different parts of the country each year, so it's not really 'national figures', but it's common for a given area to survey every 2 years, and so the bulk of the 2008 sample was made up of the same areas as 2010. So that's very suggestive.
Of course, if there is only one pupil who is afraid of going to school because of bullying, that is too many.