Advice for Professionals this Anti-Bullying Week

Kat Tremlett, a practitioner on the Professionals Online Safety Helpline, gives her advice for professionals who are concerned about cyberbullying this Anti-Bullying Week.

This Anti-bullying week the Anti-Bulling Alliance (ABA) are calling on all members of the children’s workforce to celebrate the theme ‘All Different, All Equal’. This year The Anti-Bullying Alliance are encouraging professionals to take individual and collective action to prevent bullying, creating safe environments for children where they can be themselves.

They are calling on organisations that work with young people to:

This blog highlights best practice strategies and resources to help organisations working with young people to take a more holistic approach to bullying prevention.

Focus on the behaviour

The term cyberbullying can lead to confusion when considering the best course of action to take post incident. Professionals should be confident in responding to online bullying incidences just as they would offline. After all it’s the behaviour that’s the problem, not the means by which it is delivered.

Safeguarding young people against bullying is everyone in a school’s responsibility.

In order to effectively combat bullying there has to be a culture of calling out this behaviour across the board. All staff must know what steps to take and where to go if they have concerns, as well as have the confidence to take a stand and not let any incident go, no matter how insignificant it may seem to them. .

Ultimately, bullies will find it much harder to operate in an environment where their actions are challenged and not tolerated.

The Education and Inspections Act 2006 requires all schools to have measures in place that encourage good behaviour and prevent all forms of bullying amongst pupils. These measures will be outlined most commonly in a schools’ behaviour, anti-bullying and acceptable use policies.

The Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014 outline requirements that the proprietor of an Academy or other independent school ensure that bullying at the school is prevented in so far as reasonably practicable, by the drawing up and implementation of an effective anti-bullying strategy.

Such policies and strategies should be reviewed, at the very least, annually but ideally termly and particularly after any bullying incident has taken place or been reported.

The policies should be easily accessible for parents and carers and it’s best practice to have policies which can also be easily interpreted by young people.  SWGfL’s template policies can be a huge help here.

As well as The Education and Inspections Act 2006 , schools also have a legal duty to comply with:

More information can also be found in the Department for Education’s Preventing and Tackling Bullying Guidance which was released earlier this year.

When physical bullying presents itself in school, the sanctioning and safeguarding routes to follow may seem straightforward, particularly if professionals are well versed in following these procedures.

However, when technology is involved, sometimes there is another layer of support needed. The Professionals Online Safety Helpline is open 10am-4pm Monday to Friday, and can help members of the children’s workforce with any online safety issues they or the young people they support may encounter.  

As well as being on hand to help with online safety issues, they can also help to remove harmful content where it violates a platform’s community standards.