Call for primary schools to run regular ‘bully audits’ to protect victims and find perpetrators
SCHOOLS should run regular “bully audits”, giving students the opportunity to identify perpetrators with the protection of anonymity, leading educators say.
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SCHOOLS should run regular “bully audits”, giving students the opportunity to identify perpetrators without the bullies knowing who flagged them, education leaders say.
Current and former principals yesterday called for more schools to adopt the strategy, as debate continued over the Liberal Party’s push to scrap the Safe Schools program.
The audit process involves students either writing down or being interviewed privately about who has bullied them or their friends, and how.
Meetings are then called with the parents of the alleged bullies as the school works closely with the students to change their behaviour.
Former primary principal Dorothy Allison, who also managed Autism SA’s education services and trained school leaders in the Middle East, said it had worked in her time at schools in the southern suburbs and Adelaide Hills.
Ms Allison said she had brought in the parents of any student flagged by five classmates in the same audit. Only rarely were the same students identified in subsequent audits.
She said children who would not have come forward otherwise made reports through the process, which she stressed was not about punishing bullies.
“Helping the identified perpetrator understand how he or she was perceived by other students invariably led to changes in behaviour,” she said, adding that the strategy also brought previously unknown bullies to the attention of teachers. The audits were part of a whole-school approach and over the course of four years the number of bullies identified halved.
SA Primary Principals Association acting president Julie Hayes runs similar audits at her school, Cowandilla Primary, but annually using interviews with samples of students.
“Until we hold a mirror to behaviour, sometimes kids don’t even recognise their behaviour as bullying. I think it’s a highly effective strategy. Kids care what their peers say about them.”
She also stressed it was not a “name and shame” system, as only the bullies and their parents and teachers knew they had been identified.
The Advertiser yesterday revealed a Liberal government would replace Safe Schools, which is focused on addressing bullying of gay and transgender students, with a broader anti-bullying program including resources for primary schools. But Education Minister Susan Close said it amounted “to adopt(ing) everything that’s already occurring in schools but to pretend that homophobic bullying doesn’t exist and dump Safe Schools”.
Both Ms Hayes and high school principals yesterday backed Safe Schools.