There is a climactic scene in the 2017 film Wonder where the put-upon protagonist fights back. Augie, a 10-year-old boy with a rare facial deformity, is taunted about his appearance by an older boy. A fight starts, but Augie escapes after a friend punches the bully in the face and Augie follows up by landing a kick in the bully’s groin.

As a result, Augie earns respect among his peers and his dad is filled with pride. The message is clear: bullying is largely about the assertion of power, and physical violence is a way of tackling it, turning power dynamics on their head, fending off the bullies and even winning their friendship.

The message jars with much of what is taught around bullying in Scottish schools today. No one is suggesting that you should not defend yourself if in physical danger; more problematic is the idea that bullying is simply about pecking orders and can be easily resolved by violence.

Few schools are more aware of the complexity of bullying and the need for sophisticated, far-reaching responses to it than Kilmaurs Primary, in an East Ayrshire village just outside Kilmarnock.

Dealing with bullying is “all about relationships”, says depute headteacher Marianne Bradley: improve relations between teachers and families - and between pupils - and bullying will be less of a problem. The school introduced a “positive behaviour policy” in 2017 that replaced a more sanction-based approach. The aim is to provide better support to both the victims and perpetrators of bullying, and help them understand each other better.

She admits that this has taken time for some parents to get their heads around.

“We’re not there yet [with all parents], but there’s a definite shift that when something goes wrong, when there is conflict in school, families are more open now to that restorative approach…whereas before we’d have parents on the phone just saying, ‘I want him suspended or excluded from school.’”

The new approach is important to Bradley, who qualified as a teacher in 2000 and early in her career worked in deprived parts of Edinburgh. Now, people she taught in P4 are in their mid- to late twenties. She knows some who have gone on to university and professional careers, others who have become caught up in crime - and says that she could have predicted back then which child would end up where.

“That’s wrong. At the age of 7 and 8, things should have been different so that they could have had any outcome [in life].”

Labelling a young child as a bully, she believes, is one particularly egregious mistake of the past. It accentuates “deep insecurities” that get “buried deeper and deeper” in their psyche; their future bullying behaviour, then, seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The school’s approach to bullying reflects a profound change in culture in how pupils are viewed and treated in Scottish schools more generally.

“It’s not that long ago that we had corporal punishment,” says Katie Ferguson, director of respectme, Scotland’s national anti-bullying service. For her, Kilmaurs Primary epitomises how far things have moved on: the school was part of a select group of schools, youth groups and childcare groups invited to Glasgow just before the summer holidays for a celebration of respectme’s year-long #ChooseRespect campaign, highlighting the importance of positive relationships and giving young people opportunities to talk about bullying.

‘Very distinct’ approach

Parents who want to see a bully punished for harming their child are expressing “a very natural emotion”, says Ferguson, but schools such as Kilmaurs show another way. She stresses, however, that it is crucial for parents of children who have been on the receiving end of bullying to know that their own children will get the same level of support.

Ferguson believes it is “something we should be really proud of in Scotland” that children are not definitively labelled as bullies - which carries “huge stigma” - or victims; that there is now more emphasis on conflict-resolution and improving social skills.

“We should be encouraging children to understand what they’ve done, how they’ve behaved, how that’s impacted young people,” she says. Northern Ireland, says Ferguson, has taken a fairly similar path, but England and Wales have retained more traditional approaches to bullying. Scotland is also “very distinct”, in that intent is not seen as an important factor in whether an incident represents bullying: the impact on a victim is more important in deciding whether bullying has taken place.

“The intention thing can really distract practitioners from trying to address the situation,” says Ferguson. “One of the first things someone might say is, ‘I didn’t mean it, it was just a joke, it was just banter’...that really doesn’t matter. You’ve behaved in this way, it’s had this impact and it’s not acceptable in this school, or anywhere.”

Ferguson adds that in other countries around the world bullying tends to be understood as behaviour that is repeated and persistent. In Scotland, however, official advice is that one-off incidents can represent bullying.

“Again, it’s about the message to young people: we wouldn’t dream of saying to someone [in other circumstances not involving bullying], ‘Someone has done this thing, it’s made me feel really scared, or hurt, or upset’, then saying to that child, ‘Well, if that happens again, come back, then we’ll do something.’”

Kilmaurs Primary, then, places equal weight on understanding the behaviour of - and empathising with - both those who cause and suffer harm, something that reflects wider trends across Scotland. Glasgow’s schools were lauded in an inspection report earlier this year, for example, for the progress they had made in closing the attainment gap between affluent and less well-off pupils. An 81 per cent reduction in exclusions since 2007 was seen as a key factor in that; at Kilmaurs Primary, there was not one exclusion in 2018-19.

And, in the most recent report from the Behaviour in Scottish Schools research (which has been carried out every few years since 2006 - see box, opposite), one observation about the general direction of travel in Scotland could have been written specifically to sum up Kilmaurs: “The most important element of engagement is the pupil-teacher relationship, and that includes taking an interest in, and getting to know, pupils as individuals - and pupils want teachers to be happy/smiling, enthusiastic, use humour and be calm.”

That empathy extends to families, too - when discussing bullying with staff at the school, it is striking how often the conversation turns to pupils’ mums and dads.

“I don’t remember meeting anybody’s parents outside of parents’ night back in 2000 - we’re with parents all the time now,” says Bradley, who adds that teachers’ awareness of the impact of poverty and trauma on children was far worse back then.

The school has introduced a “soft start” in P1, where parents can bring their children inside the school in the morning, hang up their jackets and spend some time in the classroom. So, thanks to frequent “wee friendly chats”, staff and parents know each other much better, and the school is hoping for a ripple effect - that other parents see it is perfectly normal to speak with teachers.

Staff say it is crucial that they are not “shaming” families by focusing on bullying above any other aspect of a particular child’s life at school. Many parents and even grandparents went to the same village school and have bad memories of their time there; they may need convincing that times have changed and teachers are now on their side.

One boy, when in P4, made his biggest mark that year by throwing a brick at a school window, an incident that was not out of character. Three years later, however, he became a house captain - because of unstinting support from staff, who repeatedly reminded him that he was capable of better, which led to a huge improvement in his behaviour.

“It was because of the relationship with the class teacher, the teacher’s relationship with his mum, a group of staff who were really behind him,” says Bradley. “It was saying to him that you can be a house captain, whereas in the past, I think people would just have said, ‘No, you can’t.’”

As to the wider benefits of its approach, the school points to improved school attendance and staff firmly believe that, ultimately, data will also show a consistent impact on attainment. Staff and parents also say the atmosphere at the school is markedly calmer. It is important to note, however, that research evidence is less conclusive on effective ways to tackle bullying.

Other initiatives are intended to complement specific work on bullying. Staff have in recent times, for example, encouraged pupils to put forward their own ideas and talk about their lives more, including those who may face profound challenges unfamiliar to their peers. Some older pupils asked if they could start an LGBT+ group. It soon had its first meeting, with 35 pupils (the school’s roll is around 200) applying to join what has been called the “inclusion and equalities group”. The group has come up with guidance for teachers on using gender-neutral language, introduced mixed-gender events at school sports days, improved awareness of why the word “gay” should not be used as an insult, and sold rainbow laces in the school to raise awareness about LGBT+ issues.

Pupils have heard from people - whether peers or others - who have talked about living with Down’s syndrome, autism and ADHD. Staff fondly recall one pupil who, asked to make a badge showing what he was most proud of, wrote: “My ADHD - that’s who I am.”

Not all is sweetness and light, of course, and staff do not claim that the school exists in perfect harmony - far from it at times. But when there are flashpoints between pupils, these tend to play out very differently now. A serious incident is still referred to the senior management team but no direct sanctions are issued. Instead, the school’s restorative approach asks pupils: “What do we do to put this right?” The process starts immediately - a pupil would not be told to put an incident to one side and only come back if it happens again.

“We just do things differently now,” says Bradley. “There are consequences, [the children] still carry that shame and guilt when they do something wrong - they know it’s the wrong thing to do. But it’s about helping reframe it for them: if you’re in the same situation again, how are you going to present differently next time?”

Bradley had “a great conversation” with a P1, who was liable to lashing out with his hands and struggled with communication. The boy was told that his teacher was worried about what had been going on between him and another boy, and to go away and have a think about it.

Five minutes later, recalls Bradley, he came back. “He said, ‘I know what I have to do. I have to sit beside him and talk to him!’ I just thought, ‘This is amazing - you do need to have a wee chat!’ Then the other boy came back and said, ‘It’s all sorted.’”

Avoiding “kneejerk reactions” and giving pupils time and space to make sense of what has happened, says Bradley, means that when a violent incident sparks into life, it tends to be over very quickly. Pupils have the self-awareness to walk away and find space to settle; previously, the pushing and verbals were likely to continue for some time, even after a teacher attempted to intervene.

Schools who adopt a similar approach to bullying as Kilmaurs, however, may find that children react better to some staff members than others - “How come he’ll do that for you?” may become a common refrain.

Bradley’s answer is this: “That’s because I sit beside that child and eat lunch. I make sure I check on that child at the start of the day. So if I ask him to stop doing something or give him an instruction, he responds to it because he knows I care about him.”

Her advice is not to stand back and look stern, not to keep your distance from pupils. “Be yourself, let them know about you - they’re curious about you,” says Bradley. “Let them be curious and tell them things. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to accept the boundaries from you or the constraints within the class. They are - and they’re going to value that much more because they value you as a person.”

Headteacher Rona Lindsay is in her office and looks across to a photo of last year’s P7s with a smile. In P5, staff recall “walking on eggshells” with this cohort, of sporadic outbursts of violence and the trouble some children had in coping with trauma. Many did not trust teachers, but those attitudes started to thaw as they were won over by teachers’ dogged pursuit of a new, more understanding approach to their behaviour.

In past years, after going up to Stewarton Academy, former pupils would occasionally come back to visit their old primary, in ones and twos. Just after the start of term this August, however, a group of 10 or so bounded in, determined to go back together to see their Kilmaurs teachers as early as possible, to let them know how much they were enjoying science, English and home economics, how much they had progressed since P5.

Those children underline the big lesson from Kilmaurs, that tackling bullying is only part of a much bigger picture - the bottom line, in Bradley’s words, is that in all situations, at all times, “these kids absolutely needed to know we were on their side”.

Lindsay points to the picture of last year’s P7s, which has pride of place on her wall. “That, there, is our success story,” she says.

Henry Hepburn is news editor at Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 27 September 2019 issue under the headline “Let them know we’re on their side’