The litany of incidents my daughter experienced was long and protracted – months of:

• stamping on her feet
• calling her names
• sending notes around class saying she was ‘a little rat’
• swearing at her
• tripping her up
• scribbling on her work and telling the teacher that my daughter had done it

My daughter would tell her teacher/ the lunchtime supervisor/ whichever adult was nominally in charge. We would tell her teacher. We would email, ring, or catch her teacher in the playground at pick-up. Her teacher would nod and say:

“Thank you for letting me know. We will deal with it.

I’ve no idea how they were ‘dealing’ with it, except that my daughter was still being punched, kicked, yelled at.

School Policies

We researched their policy on behaviour and bullying. It said:

‘Bullying is taken to be the willful and conscious desire to hurt, threaten or frighten someone using words, actions or gestures. Bullying is pre-planned and usually happens on more than one occasion.’

It Was Never Bullying

Not once, not in any call, meeting or email did anyone refer to the situation as “bullying”. From teachers to the Head. It might be ‘an incident.’ For months at Junior school it was a “friendship issue.” We felt gaslighted. It wasn’t a friendship issue. It felt more like a campaign of physical and verbal abuse.

The strongest punishment that school gave the perpetrator was a missed break and lunchtime. They didn’t miss a single day of lessons, whereas the stress took it’s toll on my daughter for hours each day and night.

School’s Duty of Care

Schools, and every member of staff in them, have a duty to keep children safe. From adults, but mostly from their peers (in our experience). But all that means nothing if all you do with your bullying policy is post it on your website, then ignore it when push comes to shove comes to trip comes to name-calling.

Children need to be able to trust adults to keep them safe. That’s fundamental to their emotional and psychological well-being. If they are scared to come into school every morning because they are afraid of what another child (or children) might do to them, that’s not okay.

And the responsibility for solving that doesn’t lie with the parents. It lies firmly with the teachers, the staff, the leadership team, the governors of the school. And the first and most obvious way to make a school a safe, welcoming place is to take bullying far more seriously than they do.

What School Can Do

LISTEN. Not just to what is being said, but the tone, the emotion, the feelings. If the child is so upset they are dysregulated, then help them calm down first.

BELIEVE THEM. If you don’t believe them, you destroy what fragile trust you might have, and if a child earns that adults aren’t trustworthy, then all bets are off. You need to know that a stressed child might experience an amygdala hijack. That means that their thinking (curly grey) matter is not actually online. So they might not remember the incident clearly. Don’t assume they are lying. Their memory of the event does not exist (clearly, or at all). Ask witnesses if the picture is unclear or confusing.

ACT. Follow your school’s policy. If something nasty happens a few times, it counts as bullying. Don’t call it something else. Record the incident. Record what you have done to resolve things.

COMMUNICATE: Tell the parents about what happened and what you’ve done as a result. Keep them in loop. Build trust between you, that you are keeping their child safe, that you are taking it seriously, that you care.

It’s not just sticks-and-stones, it is psychological warfare.

Our children deserve to go to school and feel good about who they are, not attacked for their size, their sexuality, their neuro-diversity, their beliefs, their phone or lunch.

Bullying destroys self-esteem, mental and physical health. Don’t let them win.