Simon Currigan: 0:44

How can we truly empower students to understand and have the skills to tackle bullying in schools? Imagine the transformative impact on school culture and people well-being if we address this issue effectively. This week on School Behaviour Secrets, we're delving into this critical topic with Alex Holmes, deputy CEO of the Diana Award and vice chair of the National Anti Bullying Alliance. Join us for an inspiring conversation to help make your school a safer, more supportive place. This is one episode you don't want to miss. Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. My co host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and, of course, students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're gonna share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy, and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence based strategies before anyone else. This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. Hi there. Simon Currigan here, and I'm excited to bring you another mini essentials episode of School Behaviour Secrets. I'll be sharing essential strategies and insights from a previous episode that can make a real difference for your students right away. So let's dive in and unlock some game changing tips. Today, we're going back to original episode number 83 where I joined guest speaker, Alex Holmes, to discuss approaches schools can use to tackle bullying effectively. We discussed the challenges of changing whole school culture and the positive impact that anti bullying ambassadors can make on school life. But just before we jump into that interview, I'd just like to say that if you're finding the School Behaviour Secrets podcast interesting or useful and you know someone who might like it too, please do them and us a favor by opening up your podcast app and clicking the share button so they can benefit from all the strategies and ideas that we're sharing in the podcast. Okay then, let's get rolling with my interview with Alex Holmes. So how do we, as teachers and school leaders, know if this is an issue in our schools? What sort of things should we be doing? What kind of assessments should we be doing? How should we be engaging with the kids to find out what's really going on? Because if we haven't got that information, then we can't tackle it and put systems and processes in place and and make things better for the kids.

Alex Holmes: 3:23

Yeah. I think it's, you know, really difficult job being in a school and also some of this stuff often goes on sort of between lesson times or, you know, back of class and so on. It's not always clear. I think schools can really think about the data that they have access to. So things like behaviour, incidents, monitoring, reports of bullying behaviour, whether that's members of staff that have logged that or whether it's students that have spoken out. I think also things like a anti bullying policy, which every school has, often is just a piece of paper that maybe gets reviewed by the governors and SLT maybe every 3 years. But we would really encourage students to have input in that. So view the policy, maybe rewrite it so that it's a little bit more child friendly, even produce a sort of child friendly version of it. Like, best schools, I think, that we work with in Nationwide Building society helping us train are the ones that perhaps have produced a video version of the school's anti bullying policy and then played it in assemblies or in classes. I think when students, you know, see themselves talking about something like this topic, then it, you know, really can be absorbed a little bit better. I think, you know, we they're much of the of the opinion that peer to peer is really effective. And I think that linked to that, think about what role your students can play. So a lot of schools are really good at having sort of student voice, student council, you know, even eco warriors, all those sort of things. And and I think don't forget that, actually, you can empower students to deal with behaviour and bullying. And, you know, that's what we're doing by helping to support schools to train young people to be anti bullying ambassadors, who then become the sort of eyes and ears, you know, break time, who support each other in lessons, but also outside of lessons. So I think it is a whole school approach. But if you can allow students to lead a lot of that work, then I think it really does make a difference because they speak the same language. And, you know, you are far more likely as an adult to listen to your peers, and it's the same for students.

Simon Currigan: 5:09

There's a Peter Drucker quote that says culture eats strategy for breakfast. And you talk about bullying being the victimization of difference and that being kind of accepted in the culture. Changing culture is hard. So how do we change the culture in school to where they become places where differences are celebrated rather than persecuted?

Alex Holmes: 5:28

Yeah. No. I think you're right. Changing attitudes, behaviours, and culture is hard. I think you're talking years not months really to, you know, really affect, change and for year groups to take that up throughout the school. And, you know, I think to get to that point, you have to also maybe acknowledge that when you start on this journey and this work, you might see a spike in reports or incidents of bullying because you're doing the right thing in raising awareness of the topic and helping people understand what it looks like and encourage them to feel safe and trust the systems that are in place to report and speak out. So I think, you know, you maybe see a little bit of a spike before perhaps things settle down a little bit. I think don't be one of those schools that worries if you talk about an issue, you're gonna suddenly see lots of it, you know, because the fact is it's probably going on. I mean, it's better, like, for you and your school and your students and even things that Ofsted visits, if you're actually doing something proactive about it, I would say. But I think it is a really sort of tough challenge, and you want to, as, educators, send that really sort of clear message, maybe share a little bit about why you're passionate about this. If you've got members of staff who have experienced bullying themselves when they were at school. Sharing their story might encourage others to do that. We find that creating a team of anti bullying ambassadors, it's really important that you don't just choose students that maybe have been bullied. You need people that perhaps have been bystanders to bullying or maybe even have been engaging in bullying in the past, but I have some of those really good skills and confidence to be part of the solution. And I think those sort of things, like, when you empower students to, you know, have that responsibility and they feel a sense of being trusted, then that makes a real difference and students sort of take notice of that and think about spreading those leadership opportunities throughout the school.

Simon Currigan: 7:06

What kind of skills do you think makes for a good anti bullying ambassador, or what kind of skills do we need to help those kids develop? Because often, they're going to be lacking those kind of social confidence skills or their self esteem. What kind of skills do you think we should be purposefully setting out to help those children develop?

Alex Holmes: 7:21

Yeah. I I think any sort of leadership opportunity allows students to think about sort of independent problem solving skills, you know, project management, public speaking. You know, you might even be able to think about other curriculum areas like arts or ICT being really useful in an anti bullying campaign. And I think, you know, for a team of students, it's very important that you embrace lots of those skill sets that might exist. I would say, you know, you have a real opportunity with these group of young people that you choose to, you know, give them a real maybe intervention that actually might really help them with their own concentration or their self esteem and their confidence. But, yeah, I think the main things that we often find are things like increasing collaboration or increasing listening skills, speaking skills, you know, all those sort of skills that being part of the team gives you opportunity, particularly for some of the entrepreneurial ambassadors that will get up in assembly, talk in front of their peers. It's really valuable stuff that maybe will help them, you know, create really positive relationships with both the adults that are running this and their fellow students. So, yeah, I think it does provide a lot of opportunities for really good skills to be built, but also for other curriculum areas like the computing curriculum or PHSE, you know, to be those sort of messages to be reinforced by students through the anti bullying ambassadors team.

Simon Currigan: 8:35

These are just generally really important life skills aside from helping kids with the emotional damage and the wasted potential of bullying. They they just sound like they're skills that are worthwhile to develop for their own sake, you know, on top of the benefit of the culture in school. You're involved in the positive post box campaign while we're talking about culture in school Yep. Which is a partnership between the Nationwide Building Society and the Diana Award, which is all about creating a positive climate in school. Can you tell us about how this works and how schools can get involved with it?

Alex Holmes: 9:04

Yeah. We're really proud to be working with Nationwide Building Society. They are helping us train 10,000 young people in primary schools across the country to be anti bullying ambassadors, and it's completely free to schools thanks to their support. But we're also working on this campaign because we really sort of believe in the power of positivity, and, you know, we think the the the skill of writing a letter, and also the feeling and the buzz of receiving one is really valuable to children and young people. And we and we wanna remind young people that actually they've got the potential to make someone's day through kindness, you know, for a simple sort of act like letter writing. It's very interesting with the research actually that, you know, we found that these 35% of children have never received a letter. And I think similar, 32% have never written have written a letter. And when you think back, I think, you know, to my your time at school, like, that was, you know, a big big part of that. And and I think if you had relatives, grandparents like me, you had to write a letter to say thank you when you received any sort of birthday, money, or presents. And if you didn't, you probably not thought of highly or at all next time for your birthday. So I think, you know, more importantly, this research sort of found that a lot of children would be really happy to receive and take part in something like this. So what we're doing is kind of trying to reignite the excitement for what is, I think, a bit of a dying art. And in October, we've got this positive post sports campaign, which will enable schools to sign up and participate. The first 50 schools that sign up to this, it might be schools that are listening to this podcast, would love that. Will then receive their very own sort of life-sized, postbox, and then we've got a a further sort of 250, you know, schools that will be eligible to receive, like, a smaller sort of postbox. And the idea is that we'll help facilitate schools to have a pen pal in the school. And for some schools, the opt in will help link them up with other schools so that that, you know, the idea of being able to speak to people that maybe are different from you or live different area from you. But, yeah, I think we're really excited because we think it's a positive thing, and we wanna remind particularly young people that they have the power to make someone feel great about themselves all through to some words. So, you know, it's easier to be positive than it is to be negative.

Simon Currigan: 11:06

And that was just some of my earlier interview with Alex Holmes. If you'd like to hear more, then just click the link at the bottom of the episode description to head back to the full interview. And if you're working with pupils who need help understanding and developing their emotions, we've got a really useful free download that can help called how to help children manage anger and other strong emotions because we don't spend a lot of time thinking about what to title our resources. I'll put a link in the episode description. It is full of helpful strategies, ideas, and resources that you can use to help the students that you work with. Thanks for tuning in to another Essentials episode of School Behaviour Secrets. Your feedback is what keeps us going and helps us improve. So please take a moment to rate and review us. It only takes 30 seconds, but it means the world to us. I would really appreciate it if you could do that. Thanks for listening today, and we'll catch you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.