The ability to report and record incidents of bullying behaviour is a crucial part of any anti-bullying strategy. Schools and other settings need to encourage and make it as easy as possible for children and young people to report bullying incidents.
Schools should not be afraid to collect data about levels of bullying. It is very difficult to make whole school change without this data. There are many ways you can look at data about levels of bullying in school. When you first implement your anti-bullying activity in school, expect to see an increase in levels of reporting bullying. This does not always indicate that you are not responding to the issue well and might instead be a sign that students feel better able to report incidents and more confident in schools’ response. Over time we expect to see a ‘bell curve’ action that the initial spike in reported bullying starts to decline as your anti-bullying interventions come in to force.
Having a ‘one size fits all’ approach is unhelpful when supporting children and young people who experience bullying behaviour. Therefore having a range of reporting and recording mechanisms is important. In all cases of bullying behaviour it is necessary to act quickly, but even more so if you have a child who may in it difficult communicating or remembering what has happened.
[After I had talked about the bullying and nothing happened] I started to get really angry. They [teachers] hadn’t listened. Made me feel I couldn’t talk to anyone. I started to get really angry and taking it out on my [family] at home, because no one had listened to me.
We have created a short guide below about reporting and recording bullying.