First minister Nicola Sturgeon was told today that many instances of bullying in schools go under the radar because recording practices are not good enough.
She replied that the matter was being taken “extremely seriously” and that teachers would play a central role in drawing up new national anti-bullying guidance.
The exchanges came in the week that data from the Health and Wellbeing Census Scotland 2021-22 was published, showing that 31 per cent of P5-S3 pupils surveyed said they had been bullied in the previous year.
Responding to a question from Conservative MSP Pam Gosal, Ms Sturgeon said that bullying and harassment were “completely unacceptable”. She added that, last week, an Education Scotland report on the recording and monitoring of bullying in schools had been published (see below), and that the government had subsequently announced and started a review of national anti-bullying guidance. As part of that, the first minister said, the views of teachers and pupils would be sought.
Ms Gosal said that documentation obtained by her party through freedom of information legislation showed under-reporting of bullying was “commonplace” in schools. She accused the government of “throwing pupils to the wolves”, and asked Ms Sturgeon if she would apply an “enforcement mechanism to ensure schools are accurately reporting incidents”.
The first minister said it was “important that instances of bullying are recorded properly”. She added that bullying was “particularly unacceptable in schools” and that there should be a “zero-tolerance” approach to it.
Ms Sturgeon said there was “a role for social media companies and, frankly, there’s a role for all of us as adults in our own communities, to make sure that children and young people are safeguarded and respected”, adding: “So this is a serious issue [that] the Scottish government takes extremely seriously.”
Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie, who has in recent months repeatedly raised concerns about violence in schools, said that since the Covid pandemic there had been “a lot of distressed behaviour in schools” and that teachers were being “left to pick up the pieces [without] sufficient resources to be able to manage it”.
Mr Rennie asked the first minister if schools would be given more resources to address bullying and behaviour problems.
Ms Sturgeon agreed that teachers should have “the right support and resources” to deal with such issues, and that she would be having more discussions with education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville “over my remaining few weeks in this post about exactly that issue”.
Last week, Scotland’s HM Inspectors of Education published a new report looking at how bullying is reported and monitored across primary, secondary and special schools throughout Scotland.
During September and October 2022, they visited 35 schools across all 32 local authorities, seeking views on the approaches used by schools in response to alleged incidents of bullying.
In around a third of schools, leaders did not have a whole-school process for monitoring bullying incidents, “making it difficult to identify patterns and trends across the school, therefore limiting proactive interventions by staff”.
Chief inspector of education Gayle Gorman said: “While schools using systematic approaches for recording and monitoring reported a reduction in bullying, our review highlights that this is not yet consistent across all schools. There is now a real need to improve how this is being done to ensure our children and young people feel safe, protected and listened to.”
In most schools, there was a wide range of anti-bullying strategies, with “a high degree of importance [placed] on developing positive relationships”. Most pupils knew who to speak to if they were being bullied and “agreed that their school did not accept bullying”.
Janie McManus, Education Scotland’s strategic director for scrutiny, said: “HM Inspectors found that staff across schools showed a commitment to creating safe and secure environments where bullying is openly acknowledged, discussed and challenged as unacceptable behaviour. We intend for the findings to be used to take forward work in continuing to tackle bullying.”
The report can be downloaded here.
