What Children With SEN Can Tell You About Bullying
Children with SEND know more than most about bullying, says Marius Frank – and their experiences have to be part of the conversation on eradicating it
- by Marius Frank
Children and young people with special education needs and disabilities are disproportionately bullied when compared to their peers. In fact, the most recent research (Institute of Education 2014) suggests that primary school pupils with special needs are twice as likely as other children to suffer from persistent bullying.
The impact of bullying can be profound, on the mental and physical well-being of a child, on their school achievement, and on their subsequent life chances. A recent survey of 18-year-olds conducted by the Brighton-based antibullying charity Ditch the Label brought the impact on academic progress into sharp relief: 41% of respondents who were not bullied reported attaining an A*/A grade in GCSE English. This dropped to a staggering 26% amongst those individuals who were being bullied. If this trend is extrapolated to groups of pupils who already feel vulnerable, disadvantaged by impairment or lacking confidence and self-esteem, reducing the impact and incidence of bullying becomes as critical a whole-school imperative as raising the quality of teaching – with potentially the same impact on whole-school performance.
What works
Between 2013 and 2015, Achievement for All worked in close partnership with the Anti-Bullying Alliance, Mencap, Council for Disabled Children and Contact-a-Family (which supports the parents and carers of children with disabilities) on a DfE-funded programme to address specific issues around disablist bullying. Achievement for All was responsible for creating and delivering a training programme for school-based professionals. Through a series of national training events led by a team of specially trained AfA lead coaches, staff from over 1,500 primary, secondary and special schools accessed the training. Over 96% of the delegates rated the training as good or outstanding, and now feel more confident in identifying resources and strategies that could have a positive impact on SEND bullying in their school community.
The training acknowledged that every school community is unique, with different strengths and needs. The programme was designed to raise awareness of the key issues (with resources that could be reused to support further whole school professional development), then empower schools to make informed decisions for themselves about what measures would have the biggest impact on their particular communities. Here are the top five strategies, approaches and ideas chosen by primary school delegates:
1. Named contacts
Every school had named staff (and robust systems) to deal with reported bullying, and every school had named staff (and support networks) for pupils with SEND – but the two robust systems did not necessarily ‘talk’ to each other. Given their communication difficulties, many schools realised that they needed to develop specific routes, procedures and systems to support pupils with SEND and report any incidents of bullying behaviour. Critically, this was the case for their families too. Many schools decide to develop the ‘Key Worker’ role as the conduit for reporting bullying, helping to build the relationship with the child and their parents or carers.
2. Dealing with ‘banter’
After this topic was dealt with in depth during the training, many schools reflected that, whilst making huge progress with homophobic or sexist ‘banter’ in playgrounds, social spaces and non-structured time, the same attention had not been paid to disablist banter. The impact of words like ‘spaz and ‘mong’, or ‘body-bullying’ were explored. Schools chose to investigate the use of these phrases with their school communities, and seek School Council and peer-to-peer challenge, agreement and vigilance around unacceptable use of local phrases or words.
3. Social resilience training for pupils with SEND
At first, this may seem incongruous with a clear ‘stamping out bullying’ message, because it accepts that bullying happens. We encouraged primary colleagues to consider their role as ‘stewards’ of a child’s lifelong learning journey for just a short period of time, and that developing friendship skills and assertiveness approaches with their most vulnerable children was absolutely vital, even (especially) if there was no identified bullying in their school community. Why? Perhaps this social resilience might come in handy in later life, even beyond school. Perhaps it would make the atrocities that occurred in Rochdale and Oxford, where vulnerable girls were explicitly targeted by ruthless men, less likely? The delegates spoke very highly of the resources that were made available to them to support this activity.
4. Anti-bullying mentors/ ambassadors/ buddies
Empowering the whole school community to be vigilant, assertive and active in reducing bullying was another top strategy. Initiatives like the Diana Awards were highly praised, as were specific training programmes to empower groups of pupils to take a lead role in unstructured school time. One school even named these individuals ‘Squabble Busters’. Circle time and other similar sharing and open discussion methods were also chosen for development.
5. Relaunch/refresh the school’s antibullying policy
Many schools saw this as a powerful tool to re-engage the whole school community with the key issues, and develop a common shared ownership across all members: governors, teachers, support staff, parents and carers, pupils and even the local community. Focus groups and School Council members would be actively involved in shaping the policy, and use of language would be examined. A great example of this was the large number of schools that were eradicating the use of the word ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ from every document in their school, from the staffroom and from the classroom.
Why? These words can so often be used as damaging labels. Instead, the phrases ‘child who has been bullied’ and ‘child displaying bullying behaviours’ were being widely adopted, giving everyone a chance to talk about and deal with the behaviours that need to be addressed and changed, rather than labelling an individual. Powerful stuff!
The Achievement for All CPD pack, and access to an array of supporting materials, is still freely available. AfA lead coaches can also be commissioned to lead whole-staff INSET sessions.
Our partner, the Anti- Bullying Alliance, has an extensive range of additional materials too, including online training and additional tools that can be used to raise awareness and address the key issues. Above all, we encourage every school community to talk about bullying – even (indeed, especially) if you do not think you have any.
After 30 years of teaching and leadership in challenging school communities, Marius Frank became CEO of ASDAN Education, before joining Achievement for All to lead the development of the Anti-Bullying Training Approach. He is now in charge of The Bubble, Achievement for All’s interactive online professional development portal, available to all Achievement for All education settings. Browse resources for Anti Bullying Week.
