Page 55 - Fyne winter 2014

Tackling Homophobic Bullying
in Schools - improve the information
being held about it and you improve the
opportunities to tackle it effectively.
Since 2012, Caerphilly county
borough council has worked
with schools to develop better
monitoring and better support
for pupils and teachers in
dealing with homophobic
bullying. The full report on
what we had done around all
forms of discriminatory bullying
up until December 2013 can be
found online.
School bullying in all its forms
has a deeply negative effect on
the pupils who are its victims,
but discriminatory bullying
can add an even more personal
and hurtful element to the
bullying that goes on. But where
homophobic, or other forms
of discriminatory bullying, are
not recorded as such within the
general school bullying figures,
the true nature of that bullying
can get overlooked, and any
support offered may never tackle
the root cause.
Developing discriminatory
bullying monitoring to cover
10 areas of pupil identity has
meant that the Council now has
recorded data on homophobic
incidents in schools. Since the
trial term in 2012, there is now
two full academic years’ worth
of data to be able to identify
patterns, trends and target support
at any schools where there seems
to be ongoing problems.
There are 97 education
establishments that provide
monitoring data and the
summary of the reported
homophobic data across the 7
school terms is shown in the
table below.
www.caerphilly.gov.uk/equalities or www.caerffili.gov.uk/cydraddoldeb
Summer
Term 2012
(pilot term)
Autumn
Term 2012
Spring
Term 2013
Summer
Term 2013
Autumn
Term 2013
Spring
Term 2014
Summer
Term 2014
7 2 1 2 3 5 1
Bullying of this kind is too big
an issue for one school, or one
governing body, or one council
department to tackle alone, it’s
something that needs all the
partners to work on together.
Since the last report, we have
begun providing training
sessions in schools using the
“Homophobia: Let’s Tackle
It” educational resource,
delivered by Show Racism the
Red Card. Update reports on
discriminatory bullying are also
presented to elected members
through the Education for Life
Scrutiny Committee, and to the
Community Cohesion Forum
as part of the reporting on all
hate crime and incidents in the
county borough.
We are delighted that in
Caerphilly county borough,
though there’s still so much more
to do, we’re taking the right steps
to tackle homophobia in schools.
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