Education Bill

Debate between Lord Collins of Highbury and Baroness Massey of Darwen

Monday 4th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

In moving the amendment, I acknowledge the support that I have had from both Stonewall and the Equality and Human Rights Commission in preparing it.

At Second Reading, I highlighted that homophobic bullying was reaching epidemic levels in our schools. I made it clear that this type of bullying affects young people regardless of sexual orientation in all schools including faith schools, academies and free schools. Stonewall recently published disturbing polling evidence revealing that nine in 10 secondary schoolteachers say that pupils, regardless of their sexual orientation, currently experience physical homophobic bullying, name-calling or harassment in their school. One in four teachers says that this happens “often” or “very often”.

The Government’s schools White Paper states that,

“tackling bullying is an essential part of raising attainment”.

However, while debating provisions within the Bill giving teachers the power to tackle bullying when it happens, we should not forget that schools must be in no doubt that they have a fundamental responsibility to prevent such bullying happening in the first place. Schools need to be environments where young people feel comfortable in reporting homophobic bullying. The amendment proposes that a requirement be placed on schools to record and report incidents of prejudice-based bullying. The requirement would apply to all schools, including free schools and academies.

I welcome the provisions in the Bill which attempt to deliver on the commitment to tackle bullying as set out in the White Paper, The Importance of Teaching. Nick Gibb, Minister of State for Schools, confirmed at Second Reading in another place:

“The coalition Government are committed to tackling all forms of bullying in our schools, including homophobic bullying, and the Bill makes a start by tackling the root cause of bullying—poor behaviour in our schools”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/2/11; col. 261.]

There is scope in the Education Bill to do more explicitly to tackle identity-based bullying, which, as I have detailed, is a significant and growing problem.

Both Stonewall and the Equality and Human Rights Commission recognise the importance that government places on freeing schools from unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation. Therefore, a new requirement for data collection should not be proposed lightly—and I do not propose it lightly. However, the evidence of the size of the problem, its persistence over time and its impact on young people’s lives suggest that this is a proportionate and necessary measure that will enable Ofsted, parents and pupils to hold schools to account for their progress in tackling bullying.

The EHRC evidence shows that reporting on racial bullying is already widespread, with 75 per cent of local authorities collecting data from their schools on the extent of racial and ethnic bullying. Therefore, in my opinion, it would be straightforward for existing collection and reporting mechanisms to be extended to allow for the collection of data on other forms of bullying, such as bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and religion or belief.

Another concern is the lack of data gathering to monitor incidence of prejudice-based bullying by schools, perhaps compounded by new draft guidance issued by the Department for Education. This guidance provides information on preventing and tackling bullying and streamlines previous advice, but ultimately leaves decision-making on whether to keep written records to schools. In my view, keeping records is an essential tool to tackling bullying. It is an evidence-based approach to tackling this problem. The public sector equality duty requires schools to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and to consider how they could positively contribute to the advancement of equality and good relationships. As such, they are required to analyse the effect of their policies and practices on all the protected grounds.

Prejudice-based bullying is clearly one of the key issues affecting pupils, and a requirement to record and report across all protected grounds would help schools to meet their duty to support improvement in educational experiences and outcomes for pupils. I beg to move.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for this amendment. He makes many powerful points about homophobic bullying. This is a very serious issue. Research has shown that many young people who are gay feel excluded and even suicidal when they are bullied because of their sexual orientation. Bullying has become a very much more complex issue in recent years. It can happen to any child, and some more than others. The person who is doing the bullying also has problems, as well as the child who is being bullied. We have to tackle all that complex mix.

Mobile phones and the internet, in and out of school, have driven some young people who are bullied to suicide, not just to suicidal feelings. We need to look at this very seriously. The issue of keeping records is important, but I would go back to something that I remember Graham Allen saying recently. One thing is having the firemen to deal with a situation but, before that, we need to have smoke alarm systems. I want to talk about the smoke alarms here, not literally but metaphorically.

We need to teach about bullying, in PSHE or wherever, and address the reasons why some people are bullied, why some people do the bullying and the feelings involved there. That is the first point. We need to discuss bullying with pupils in school and have them express their feelings about it. It is also a matter of what is happening in lessons and within the school’s own ethos: how does the school tolerate this?

There is another issue about having a school policy on bullying and on behaviour generally. We mentioned school councils the other day, and I gave the example of the school where I am a governor having a council which sets for each classroom, in an agreed form, the classroom behaviour code. This should be encouraged by schools because it is devised by the pupils themselves. Where the pupils have an issue and make the policy—on bullying, for example—it is much more likely to be effective. While I agree with my noble friend about keeping records, it is also important for schools to have a policy on bullying which is kept to and agreed by the pupils.