How good is your setting at preventing and managing bullying?
We’ve all experienced or witnessed bullying in our lives.
It used to be described as ‘character building’, something you had to put up with if you wanted to be accepted by peers. However, over the years we’ve come to learn how much damage bullying can do to our mental health and emotional wellbeing. It can, if not prevented or challenged, create a threatening environment that may allow other safeguarding risks, such as child on child abuse, to take root.
Bullying can also have a serious effect on families. The parents and carers of the people involved can experience guilt because they didn’t protect their children. They will often blame the adults who had a duty of care for the setting in which the bullying took place and remove them from it. Other parents and carers may follow suit if they feel that their children are at risk and warn others about the setting.
This challenges those with that duty of care to manage a difficult situation while, maybe, sharing the same emotions of shock and anxiety that the parents and carers are experiencing.
To prevent this, it’s important to develop an environment that will always challenge bullying behaviour and will encourage safe and supportive relationships between children. This requires strong active policies, procedures, practice and promotion, but it can be difficult to know where to start.
The Anti-Bullying Quality Mark provides a framework for developing and managing sustainable approaches to anti-bullying that involves everyone: leaders, children, parents and carers.
Developed initially, with the support of the Anti-Bullying Alliance, for schools in Gloucestershire and Swindon, Anti-Bullying Quality Mark-UK became a national scheme in 2012, with international schools joining from 2021. The Quality Mark for out-of-school settings was developed last year, in consultation with Abby Wilkins, Chief Operations Officer at Out of School Alliance, and her OOSC and they achieved the award in January 2024.
The framework challenges settings to review and strengthen their management of anti-bullying with reference to standards in 5 areas:
- Leadership,
- Policy,
- Evaluation & Planning,
- Staff Involvement
- Children’s Learning and Involvement.
Resources and coaching are provided to assist with this process.
When settings have completed this work, they are asked to submit evidence for an Initial Evaluation before arranging for a visit to the setting for a Final Evaluation, in which the Evaluator consults staff, children and parents/carers about how bullying is managed. The Quality Mark is awarded if all the standards have been met and the setting receives a Certificate and a badge that can be used on promotional materials to show the community how good the setting is at preventing and responding to incidents of bullying behaviour.
Abby’s positive experience of the process has been echoed by many school leaders over the years, as indicated on the Home page of the ABQM-UK website: https://www.abqm-uk.com.
Many felt that the research-based and evidence informed standards provided a much-needed guide to changing the culture of their settings. Others welcomed the resources and support that they received in the process. All of them appreciated the value of actively involving the whole community, especially the children, in planning approaches and putting them into practice; it meant that responsibility for preventing bullying was shared, rather than dropped on the shoulders of leaders and staff members. Overall, they were excited to achieve recognition of the quality of their anti-bullying provision.
We look forward to working with more out of school settings in collaboration with OOSA with the hope that children will feel safe, welcomed and included in all areas of their lives.