Bullying Online: This website provides help and advice for parents who are tackling bullying. The site explain, step by step, how to tackle the problem and what happens if you take legal action. Bullying Online has been approved as a National Curriculum content provider and the site is recommended by the DfES, Victim Support, 65 UK councils and more than 20 police forces.

http://www.bullying.co.uk/

This is an issue which we are currently looking at in detail at head of year meetings. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has experience with any form of anti-bullying measures, such as a sixth-form led council, peer mediation etc. Please add comments about things which disn't work as well as things that did!

KerryD
North Yorks

For lots of reasons I have found http://www.bullyonline.org very useful recently. I notice that it also has a school bullying section that maybe of some use.

I have a passionate interest in bullying in the workplace. It appears to be developing as a severe problem in the nation's schools, and I believe we are only scraping the surface of the issue at the moment.

I hope that this forum will be able to take it on board. I am retired on health grounds and am only too happy to lend a friendly ear and share my experiences with any teacher who is suffering out there.

I have also built up some media contacts and would welcome ant ideas from anyone as to how we can highlight the public's awareness of a situation which is having such a pround effect on the nation's schools.

I have two email addresses dedicated to this issue, which can be found on my entry in the biographical section of the forum.

Do you mean bullying of staff? That's very true - it's an important issue. I've started a new thread to deal with it to keep it seperate from ideas about tackling student bullying, though obviously they will occassionally overlap. But we can use the new thread for colleagues to talk about their own experiences of bullying in the workplace, and for all of us to offer support and constructive advice to each other.

Yes, I did mean bullying of staff. I've seen your new thread and have already posted on it. I'd be happy to help anyone on this forum who feels that my experiences could be of any help in their situation.

A team of psychologists led by Peter Smith at Goldsmiths College has just investigated the cases of more than 5,000 adults who have been the victims of bullying.

The researchers discovered that the victims of adult bullying were usually bullied at school. They came to the conclusion that certain types of people were vulnerable to bullying. This included low self-esteem, disability, physical weakness, shyness, maternal overprotection, lack of friends and social rejection of peer group.

Smith discovered that the least effective coping strategies for bullied children include crying and fighting back. The most successful responses are to tell a teacher or friend. The theory is that bullying tends to thrive in environments where bystanders collude by not intervening.

However, I would argue that adults that are bullied tend to rely on the strategies that they developed as children. This is a mistake. The only way to deal with bullies as an adult is to verbally stand up for yourself (especially in public situations). Adult bullies always find it difficult to deal with this situation. This is especially true of senior members of staff in a school.

John, that's interesting. Other research has suggested that the prfile of adult victims may be different:

http://www.workplacebullying.com/Masters_Thesis.htm