Education Bill

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for this amendment. He makes many powerful points about homophobic bullying. This is a very serious issue. Research has shown that many young people who are gay feel excluded and even suicidal when they are bullied because of their sexual orientation. Bullying has become a very much more complex issue in recent years. It can happen to any child, and some more than others. The person who is doing the bullying also has problems, as well as the child who is being bullied. We have to tackle all that complex mix. Mobile phones and the internet, in and out of school, have driven some young people who are bullied to suicide, not just to suicidal feelings. We need to look at this very seriously. The issue of keeping records is important, but I would go back to something that I remember Graham Allen saying recently. One thing is having the firemen to deal with a situation but, before that, having smoke alarm systems. I want to talk about the smoke alarms here, not literally but metaphorically. We need to teach about bullying, in PSHE or wherever, and address the reasons why some people are bullied, why some people do the bullying and the feelings involved there. That is the first point. We need to discuss bullying with pupils in school and have them express their feelings about it. It is also a matter of what is happening in lessons and within the school’s own ethos: how does the school tolerate this? There is another issue about having a school policy on bullying and on behaviour generally. We mentioned school councils the other day, and I gave the example of the school where I am a governor having a council which sets for each classroom, in an agreed form, the classroom behaviour code. This should be encouraged by schools because it is devised by the pupils themselves. Where the pupils have an issue and make the policy—on bullying, for example—it is much more likely to be effective. While I agree with my noble friend about keeping records, it is also important for schools to have a policy on bullying which is kept to and agreed by the pupils.