Anti-bullying Week

Mike Kane Excerpts

Thursday 15th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey, on quite a momentous day in Parliament. If I may tease the Minister gently, let me say that it is great to see at least one Minister left in place. When I came in today, I saw on social media the headline “May resigns”, but then I realised that it was about Paul May, chief executive of Patisserie Valerie—so the Minister can rest easy for a few more minutes.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), who is passionate about the subject and is a great representative for his university town. This is a timely debate; as the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) said, online bullying is a horrible thing. Holding public office in Parliament, which she spoke about, is a real gift.

There are two types of power: power over people and power with people. Power over people is the worst form of coercion that can be exercised by anyone, especially when it comes from elected officials. It has all the elements of bullying: it is aggressive, belittling and coercive. I am sure that the Minister agrees—as you do, Mr Bailey—that in this place we have to do more to root it out, because people should be treated with respect and dignity in the workplace.

To give an example, we display Parliament’s new anti-bullying policy in my constituency office in Manchester. It occasionally forms part of our team meeting, so that we can make sure that we treat one another and our constituents with respect and dignity, and that they treat us in the same way. We will neither kowtow to people who bully us, nor bully them. Poor behaviours should be pointed out. Many staff in this place have suffered horrendously over the past few years, and I look forward to the day when we take a more collegiate approach. It is not just about how we stop bullying, but about how we deal with it when it happens. How this mother of Parliaments cleans up its own act will be key.

The theme of this year’s Anti-bullying Week is “Choose Respect”. It is centred around the fact that bullying is a behaviour choice, and that children and young people can set a positive example by opting to respect each other at school, in their homes and communities and online. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) for coming forward and sharing his own personal experience of bullying—seven years of being punched in the face, kicked down the stairs and mentally tortured so badly that he had three breakdowns. It was not until he was assaulted so badly that the police were called that he felt able, as a vulnerable teenager, to speak up.

As my hon. Friend’s personal story so eloquently portrays, bullying can be devastating for the victim. It permeates every minute of every single day, even when the victim is not in the presence of those who are causing them harm. Bullying is intensified when it happens in a school environment, because in any given school day there will be times when no teacher or staff member is present to spot it and stop it. Nor is it confined to physical space, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge points out: an estimated 5.43 million young people in the UK have experienced cyber-bullying, with 1.26 million subjected daily to extreme cyber-bullying.

The Department for Education’s guidance for schools, headteachers, staff and governing bodies on preventing and tackling bullying states:

“Every school must have measures in place to prevent all forms of bullying.”

However, does the Minister really think that schools can invest in strategies to prevent bullying, when across the country—including in the Prime Minister’s constituency—they are having to write to parents to ask for resources? As a result of cuts, they have fewer adults in the classroom to provide essential teaching support. Larger class sizes mean that children do not get as much attention as they used to.

I suspect that the Government do not have a statistical database, but statistics suggest that more than 16,000 young people are absent from school because of bullying. Bullying has a huge impact on young people’s self-esteem, and 30% of young people have gone on to self-harm as a result. Perhaps most devastatingly of all, 10% of young people have attempted to commit suicide as a result of bullying. The impacts of bullying continue to ripple out long after young people have escaped their tormentors; those who have been bullied are more than twice as likely to have difficulty in keeping a job or in committing to saving.

The sad reality is that some children who need mental health support as a result of bullying will leave school and move into adulthood without ever getting it, because our mental health services are also in a funding crisis. Looked-after children are reported to experience bullying at a much higher rate than their peers. Almost every single looked- after child has already endured some form of trauma, and at least 45% enter care with a diagnosable mental health condition. As the Government are now presiding over the largest number of children in care since the 1980s—in March 2017 it reached 72,670—can the Minister explain what the Department for Education is doing to provide specialist support for them when they are subjected to bullying?

Children with disabilities or special educational needs also experience bullying at a higher rate than others, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge pointed out. The long-held view, which dates right back to the Education Act 1981 and is supported by Ofsted, is that well-resourced mainstream schools are best placed to improve the learning and social environment for disabled and non-disabled learners alike. Children with special educational needs are increasingly being pushed out of mainstream schools; recent figures suggest that 19,000 children were off-rolled between years 10 and 11, and the Government do not know where 10,000 of them went on to. In this day and age, when we are much more aware of child sexual exploitation and child criminal exploitation, those figures are very worrying indeed.

In 2016, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child examined the Government’s compliance with the UN convention on the rights of the child and found that they were failing in 150 areas across the board. What has the Minister done to address that since the committee’s report?

It is estimated that one child in every single class experiences severe bullying. I know that the Minister agrees that that is one child too many. Speaking as a former primary school teacher, I know that children will have woken up this morning feeling sick at the thought of going to school because of the fear of the damage that their bullies will wreak on them throughout the day. Some will never have made it to school at all, while others will have spent the whole day anxious and unable to concentrate in class.

We go into teaching because we believe in the value of education and in its power to create social mobility and ambition for all. I hope that the Minister will share with us how he intends to ensure that no child has to experience bullying, and that all children can reap the full benefits that a good education can provide. I hope that he will share in the theme of Anti-bullying Week by choosing to respect our schools and teachers and giving them the resource and support that they need to beat the bullies.