Anti-Bullying

As a school we have a robust system in place for dealing with bullying of any kind. If you learn that your child is being bullied, the first step is to get in contact with the school and inform of what you suspect or what you know. Without this initial contact, sometimes it can be difficult to know everything that goes on within the school community. You can make contact with any member of staff you feel comfortable talking to such as their form tutor, their Assistant Head of Year or Head of Year, or directly to Ms. Morrow. You can ask to set up a meeting or simply speak on the phone. You may wish to meet with or without your child in attendance. Try and keep a note of what is happening. It’s really useful if your child can give names or places where the bullying is occurring. If the bullying is cyber-bullying then any print outs or screen shots are really helpful and keeping any text messages as evidence can also be of use. We also have a team of trained community support officers and police who work closely with the school and often they can also be of use when dealing with serious incidents or those that are happening outside of school. It is important that these incidents that occur on social media outside school are reported to the police and to the community standards contacts for the specific social media platform the bullying has occurred on. It is really important when talking to the school that you try not to be aggressive or lose your temper. We do understand how frustrating and upsetting the issue of bullying can be for everyone but working together, rather than against each other is of prime importance and can help achieve a much better resolution for your child.

What we do at Ormiston Endeavour Academy

 It is important to acknowledge that bullying can occur in all environments and at all ages. Those schools who claim that they do not have a bullying problem are often ignoring what is really going on in terms of relationships within their institution.  What is important are the steps we take to deal with it and working together towards a long-term solution rather than a quick fix. Some bullying issues can be incredibly complex and take a long-time to ‘unpick’. As a school we are committed to the following;

  • Taking the problem seriously
  • Investigating any reported incident
  • Interviewing the reported ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ individually
  • Talking to any witnesses or staff who may be involved
  • Raising the awareness of bullying in the school community via assemblies, whole school activities and PSHE sessions
  • Using restorative work and mediation to acknowledge feelings and to challenge and ultimately change behaviour
  • Working closely with the victims and bullies on long term solutions, actions plans and goals.

Further information and support can be found in:

Parents guide to Bullying

Anti-bullying Policy