I couldn’t have been a more nervous new principal when an experienced principal on a study tour from New South Wales entered my Year 3 classroom.
She’d already made it abundantly clear that she did not believe the statistical improvements we’d reported in our low socio-economic school around bullying and wellbeing. That we didn’t even have an anti-bullying program to brag of fueled her sharp skepticism.
She knelt beside a shy, slight and cautious Aboriginal girl and asked her what her school does about bullying. “Nothing,” came my student’s quiet reply, and my heart sank.
The principal stared smugly at me like a detective who’d solved a whodunnit through her own sheer guile. Then my student said, “We sort of just don’t do that here.” My student had also earned herself a certificate at assembly the ensuing Friday morning.
In that sentence lies the whole problem – and the whole solution. Bullying isn’t a behavioural problem. It’s a cultural problem.
Just this weekend, the Federal Ggovernment announced schools must act on any bullying report within two days, supported by some shiny new online resources.
Personally, I don’t doubt Education Minister Jason Clare’s intent. The harm is real and the tragedies unbearable.
That said, a two-day reporting rule and a $10 million awareness campaign risk doubling down on the two kneejerk reactions to bullying that have never worked – haste and awareness.
It simply isn’t possible to fix complex cultural issues by responding faster to individual incidents. What’s required to respond effectively and to reduce the frequency and severity of bullying is to build empathy and compassion in young people. And that takes time.
Awareness raising has spurned a micro-industry of guest speakers, theme days and online resource creators who are training students and parents that anything uncomfortable should be labelled bullying in order to have maximum school resources hurled at it.
School leaders everywhere are familiar with the pervading phenomena of parents labelling literally every playground spat as bullying. In this landscape, if a school truly investigated every complaint within two days, they’d never teach again.
Nor are our teachers short on resources in this area. A quick Google search will lead them to millions, most sponsored by companies and organisations who rely perversely on the problem not improving.
It’s not like we don’t actually know what to do. We just don’t like the evidence enough to popularise its potential.
The seminal research on school bullying was conducted by Helen Cowie and the University of London in 2012. They studied 1378 schools who were already outperforming others when it comes to bullying, and they combed for commonalities.
They didn’t find zero-tolerance approaches that outcast the students who most need to learn. They didn’t find disciplinary crackdowns, posters on the walls about bystanders or teachers burrowing into government-funded resource hubs.
They found schools who understood that they are learning institutions, not judicial systems. They found schools who knew that teaching empathy in context is the way to deprive bullying of the oxygen it needs to thrive.
They found schools where they “sort of just don’t do that,” because they use approaches, like Restorative Practices, to install the requisite care and consideration in young people for the intoxicating power of bullying behaviours to be resisted.
I get it. As parents, we find it so challenging to consider that more carrots might be the answer, rather than more sticks. It feels dangerous and uncomfortable.
But the truth about these complex social issues is rarely convenient. And while we’re dealing with the inconvenient, we might also consider that it’s not possible to counter the scourge of bullying without a little of it happening.
While intentional trauma is not the aim, it’s through the friction and ugliness of negative social interactions that our kids learn to build another potent protective factor against bullying – resilience.
And while our politicians refuse to support schools to do what works, our parents hover like helicopters over their kids, denying them access to the powerful learning that happens when unsupervised, uncomfortable and unavoidable people around them get a bit mean.
Schools already have a plethora of online toolkits and state-delivered time limits, which will never strengthen the moral obligation they already feel to help their students.
What they lack is the permission to do what works and the human resources to enact it with increasingly neurodiverse and fractured kids. Give schools the counsellors, the aides and the wellbeing staff they need to provide meaningful support.
We should never forget that the teachers now required to respond to bullying within 48 hours are the same ones who are being driven from the profession by exhaustion and purposeless workload.
Perhaps we might just afford them the time, trust and training to finally put a dent in a bullying epidemic where the cost of meek policy leadership is too often paid with the lives of our kids.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. If you’re ready to move beyond policies and posters, and start tackling bullying where it really lives (in school culture), make sure you join me for The Bullying Breakthrough online workshop.
It’s on Wednesday 29 October at 4.00pm AEDT.
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