Schools are trying to “un-normalise” sexual harassment, but this depends on building strong relationships with students and investing in wraparound services, a Welsh Parliament committee heard this morning.
The committee also heard that it is wrong to “be naive” and think of peer-on-peer sexual harassment as “just a secondary school issue”.
Laura Doel, director of the NAHT Cymru school leaders’ union, told the Welsh Parliament’s Children, Young People and Education Committee that: “Those age-appropriate conversations need to happen and we need to not be afraid of having those conversations with children in primary schools.”
She added: “There are children in Year 5 and 6 in primary schools with mobile phones - they have access to things.”
The committee launched its short inquiry into peer-on-peer sexual harassment in January following extensive media coverage of the issue and a report from the Welsh schools inspectorate, Estyn.
The Estyn report said that most common forms of in-school, peer-on-peer sexual harassment were students catcalling and making hurtful comments, making homophobic comments (mainly towards boys), and making comments about appearance.
Tackling sexual harassment in schools
The inspectors reported that “most girls” said being asked for nude photographs by boys was “a regular occurrence”. Estyn added that there was “sharp polarisation between what pupils say is happening and what staff know”.
The report said that around 61 per cent of female students had experience of peer-on-peer sexual harassment and 82 per cent had witnessed it, compared with a lower proportion of male students (29 per cent and 71 per cent respectively).
However, secondary headteacher Chris Parry, who also gave evidence to the education committee today, said he believed the issue was even more widespread than the Estyn report suggested.
“I think that probably underestimates the fact that most people in schools will have experience of, or have witnessed, or can describe an incident where they felt uncomfortable,” he said.
“In the past what has happened is because incidents like this have been normalised... what we are trying to do is un-normalise them.”
The key, he said, was to ensure that young people had “trusting relationships with adults where they can talk about these things”.
Mr Parry said: “I run a boys’ school. Boys don’t talk anyway, so getting them to say anything at all other than what happened in the rugby or the football on the weekend is usually a challenge. But it is, ultimately, absolutely about creating those relationships with people where they feel that they can trust you to talk about those things, and to get good advice.”
He also stressed the importance of building trusting adult relationships for girls if the goal is “to build strong girls who are confident and able to talk about these issues in order to stop them”.
This requires investment “often in non-teaching roles”, he said - but these roles tend to disappear when budgets were tight.
Mr Parry said his school had been able to invest in “pastoral support officers” - whom he described as “vital” non-teaching professionals with no classes who can “take the time to sit down and speak”. But he said he was worried about what the future holds, given that “when finance becomes difficult, those things tend to disappear”.
“I have seen [multi-agency support staff] when they are in plenty and I’ve seen them when they’re non-existent. So, at the minute, we are in a place where we currently are served quite well but I worry about the future - about where we are going to go with some of the financial issues - and about whether we will be able to continue in the way that we are at the minute,” he said,
“I think, with this particular issue, if we are trying particularly to build strong girls who are confident and able to talk about these issues, in order to stop them, then we need that network of support around them - particularly for the girls who we identify as being very vulnerable. They need those people around them to give them that help so they can express how they feel.”
Eithne Hughes, director of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) Cymru, echoed this, saying that whole-school assemblies were the places to deliver some messages but “not the place for the kind of sensitive discussion required around these issues”.
She said: “It needs to be in the timetable, it needs to be given space, and it needs to be given time, and it needs to be with teachers who are also comfortable delivering the messages that are required for this particular topic.”
However, as well as emphasising the importance of training for teachers, she also stressed the need to involve a wider range of professionals and take “a multi-agency approach”.
But, like Mr Parry, she said that “wraparound support services” were “the soft underbelly of schools”, and that when funding was reduced, they disappeared.
She said: “The diminution of resources over the last years has had an effect where you have got social workers who are thin on the ground; you have got ed psychs who are unavailable; school counsellors who are like hen’s teeth; and you have got police liaison officers who, again, are brilliantly effective but it isn’t always easy to get hold of the police liaison officer when you wish to have that.
“It’s got to be a multi-agency approach to this particular issue. Schools cannot do this on their own.”
