OPINION: Bullying and the school climate

All is not well for a lot of children in school. One third of post-primary students don’t feel welcome there, or fully able to express themselves authentically. This shocking finding is from a new piece of research published recently (June 20th), to their great credit, by the Department of Education, based on information its inspectors gathered from 2346 students across the country.
The tendency heretofore when discussing bullying is for principals, teachers, policy makers and indeed parents to focus on individual bullying, i.e. students bullying students. This is understandable, because they are the most obvious and typical examples of what we tend to understand as bullying. It could be one student excluding another, or calling names or being mean in some way. And of course these behaviours have to be tackled. But at its core, bullying is about the abuse of power one person, or group of people, has over another.
In schools the adults wield all the power. So we must also consider institutional bullying – where the policies, rules and punishments of a school, decided by the adults, are oppressive of students. Therefore, rather than framing the issue of bullying solely as a peer on peer issue, it is critically important to recognise and address the significant impact that the institutional culture of a school has on creating a climate that oppresses students and spawns bullying.
It was refreshing to hear an expert in the field of bullying name that particular elephant in the corner – the institutional culture of the school – as something that needs to be examined when addressing bullying. Professor James O’Higgins Norman, UNESCO Chair on Bullying and Cyberbullying, DCU, emphasised this point when he gave his reaction to the Department’s findings on RTÉ’s Drivetime programme. He said that, “Bullying is not a phenomenon that is divorced from the rest of the reality in school. The climate of the school really dictates the extent to which bullying will take place, so we need to look at our schools at a very deep level.”
Unfortunately, school authorities do not tend to self-reflect on a deep level. In the busy school environment, where management and staff are dealing with more tangible and immediate matters, we tend to treat such philosophical activities as box-ticking exercises. Leadership is critical. If school leadership does not see the value in it, it will not happen in any deep and meaningful way.
He described a good school climate as one where “there is open communication between school leadership and the staff, students and parents, and that everybody together is making decisions that impact on the lives of the kids.” Thankfully, there are schools where this is the case. But openness and inclusion in decision-making are not part of the DNA in many Catholic schools. Secrecy and control are more the modus operandi of the Catholic ethos. For example, go onto most Catholic school websites and see if you can find out who the chairperson and members of the Board of Management are. You will find it quite difficult. In contrast, schools under the patronage of Educate Together or the Education and Training Board are much more transparent in this regard. Their ethos is much more democratic. Achieving any open, unfettered, no holds barred examination of the institutional culture of Catholic schools will be an uphill battle.
Furthermore, O’Higgins Norman emphasised that, “One of the things that is most absent from our schools is a full recognition of the voice and the agency of the child.” Student Councils are a step in the right direction, but within a repressive culture they run the risk of modelling false consultation, where all options are never genuinely on the table, disempowering students in the process. I remember hearing a school principal complimenting the teacher who was responsible for the student council for keeping them under control – in other words not allowing them to question too much of the system.
O’Higgins Norman stressed that, in his wide research with students, he is constantly hearing from children that nobody is listening to them, “They are making decisions about us – we are being told what to wear, we are being told what to learn, we are being told we can have mobile phones, we are being told we can’t have mobile phones. Nobody is listening to us.”
He believes that the key to transforming the institutional culture of schools is to give recognition to the genuine experience and the voice of children in our schools. That indeed would be a positive transformation. It will take open-minded and progressive leadership.