We have come to the end of an academic year that I think I can safely say is the strangest we’ve ever encountered ...
In the first week of schools closing to most pupils we saw the number of school and children’s workforce staff accessing our free CPD anti-bullying online training rocket up tenfold. Our site crashed and we had to work to ensure our site could handle the huge amount of traffic. I was thinking about this the other day and something struck me, at one of the scariest times in all our lives the first instinct of school and children's workforce staff up and down the country was to think about what they could to utilise this time to learn more to ultimately protect the wellbeing and safety of children and young people.
Pupils will be returning to schools in September having had vastly different experiences. Many will have been shielded from the worries we have, will perhaps have had a nice break and be raring to get going again. But many children will have had a really difficult time at home and struggled to stay connected to friends and learning. Some will be worried about returning and perhaps worried about bullying that they may have been experiencing. It’s a difficult time and there are challenges ahead but ABA and our members will be here to provide a helping anti-bullying hand.
Going forward we will continue to challenge ourselves to do better to address racism and racist bullying in school. We need to hear schools being explicit about their desire to tackle inequality, including racism in school. They should be looking across their system to do this, thinking about their own bias too. Pupils should be asked about their experiences of racism and racist bullying, and we call on the government to consider training for school staff and to conduct research into levels of racist bullying that are happening in schools across the country.
We will continue to be providing you with tools and resources over the summer our free All Together whole-school programme is open to new schools so sign up today and, of course, our free CPD online training remains available over the summer break.
We hope you all manage to have a restful summer where you can and thank you for everything you continue to do.
The ABA Team
