Children: Racist and Islamophobic Bullying

Lord Elton Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My department pays significant attention to this area and has a particular group of people who carry out due diligence for it. It is also looking at concerns or issues about extremism in schools. We are heavily focused on this.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, can my noble friend tell us what guidance and support trainee teachers get in methods of dealing with this sort of abuse and bullying and how that is built on in their continuing development programmes?

[Lord Nash]

We recently reduced the length of the guidance to schools on bullying from 481 pages, which of course nobody can absorb, to 11. There is a view that we may have gone slightly too far, and we are looking again at whether we should improve certain aspects. Of course, all teachers should receive behaviour management training in ITT. We are also substantially improving the amount of in-school training with the expansion of teaching schools. We have a high number of SMEs and NLEs that are especially focused in this area.