With a general election coming up in 2024, below you'll see our key asks we have of political parties considering the content of their manifestos. It includes the key policy changes we believe need to be applied to help enable us to prevent and improve how we respond to childhood bullying.
Election manifestos - our three anti-bullying policy asks of political parties
Bullying has affected almost everyone in some way:
- Research shows that 30% of children have been bullied in the last year alone [1] – with approximately one child in every classroom being bullied each day. Likewise, research shows that 1 in five children have been bullied online [2].
- Bullying has a significant impact on a child’s life and this can last well into adulthood with adults who were bullied as children being more likely to leave school with no qualifications, be unemployed and experience a range of mental health issues [3].
- We have estimated that the long-term economic impact associated with childhood bullying in Britain costs the economy roughly £11 billion pounds each year [4].
- The cost of not addressing bullying is too high both for people’s lives and for our economy.
Our manifesto asks:
- We'd like to see schools required to have an anti-bullying lead responsible for coordinating an anti-bullying strategy
- Initial teacher training should include anti-bullying training: Currently, teachers are not required to even know what bullying is as part of their initial teacher training.
- There should be a duty to record bullying in schools in England as there currently is for schools in Northern Ireland.
- Improved school buildings can help reduce bullying. A recent 2022 study found that a well-designed school building can reduce bullying by improving visibility and supervision, physical and psychological comfort and safety, and social-emotional competencies [5].
- There should be a greater focus on reducing bullying to improve school attendance. Our own research has found that 1 in 10 children report missing school due to experiencing bullying [6].
Our Young ABA answers the question: Why is anti-bullying training for teachers so important?
If you would like to find out about the rest of our policy recommendations, please find them here.
References:
[1] Longitudinal study of young people in England: cohort 2, wave 2 – Department for Education 2016
[2] Online bullying in England and Wales: year ending March 2020 - Office of National Statistics - https://www.ons.gov.uk/ releases/onlinebullyinginenglandandwalesyearendingmarch2020
[3] Takizawa R, Maughan B, Arseneault L. “Adult health outcomes of childhood bullying victimization: Evidence from a 5-decade longitudinal British birth cohort” is published in the American Journal of Psychiatry
[4] ABA have extrapolated from: ‘https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/87914/1/Evans-Lacko_Childhood%20Bullying_Acce…’ research
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9738177/
[6] https://anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/aba-our-work/news-opinion/children…
