The plight to stop children from bullying others is a hard enough task, What makes it even more difficult, is the fact that the very same people entrusted with controlling the issue are bullied themselves:
BULLYING of staff is rife within Australian schools, with parents and students among the top perpetrators, research reveals.
A staggering 95 per cent of educators claimed they had experienced at least one of 42 bullying behaviours identified by the researchers.
The most common was personal confrontation or professional destabilisation, often resulting in a deterioration of mental and physical health.
The new book Bullying of Staff in Schools – to be launched by former defence force chief Peter Cosgrove tomorrow – examines bullying where an adult is either the perpetrator or the target.
Researchers Dan Riley, Deirdre Duncan and John Edwards surveyed 2529 employees at schools across all sectors. Respondents reflected the national profile of 83 per cent female and 27 per cent male educators.
Two-thirds were teachers – more than 50 per cent had 21 years or more teaching experience – one in five executives and one in 15 principals.
According to the research, 81 per cent experienced bullying from parents, and 79 per cent named colleagues, closely followed by executives.
Students were named as bullies by 75 per cent of respondents, about seven percentage points higher than principals.
The principal was identified as the most persistent bully, followed by members of the executive and colleagues.
Educators said the most common form of bullying behaviour was questioning decisions, judgment and procedures, followed by tasks set with unreasonable or impossible targets or deadlines, and then being exposed to an unmanageable workload.
This highlights the uselessness of bullying policies and programs. For us to get on top of this problem, we must address bullying of all natures to all parties. Until the culture of bullying is remedied from the Principal down, our children have no chance!
Tags: Australian, Bullying, Bullying of Staff in Schools, Dan Riley, Deirdre Duncan, Department of Education, Education, John Edwards, Parents, Peter Cosgrove, Schools, Students, Teachers
Topical Teaching 
May 9, 2012 at 8:15 am |
“The principal was identified as the most persistent bully, followed by members of the executive and colleagues.”
Why am I not surprised? Unfortunately a culture of top down bullying is thoroughly embedded in the very fabric of our educational environment. They don’t call it bullying because the very procedures, processes and policies adopted, while using deprecating language about bullying, use bullying to achieve the ends of the organisation. Consider the punitive language that surrounds the Employee Management and Performance Conduct unit of the NSW Department of Education and Communities. The entire purpose of the EPAC is to conduct witch hunts.
It can be no other way while ever the Minister of Education is seen to be at the apex of the Education pyramid. All documentation pertaining to the management of employees, teachers, executives and principals, is couched in Dickensian English, expressing a master – servant relationship. The master is always right. Problems are caused by servants doing something wrong. It is almost as if the management of the organisation is caught in a time warp when NSW was a penal colony; managing convicts.
Surely it should be the case that at the apex of the Education pyramid are the children whom the system is supposed to serve. Supporting these are the teachers. Everything that happens in the education system should be subordinate to and supportive of the transactions that take place between students and their teachers.
Until there is a huge paradigm shift, a radical change in the corporate mindset, I see no prospect of improvement. When that happens each level in the management structure will be responsible for the health and prosperity of those levels for which they have supervisory oversight.
Here is a disgraceful instance. In a difficult to staff school, where general standards (NAPLAN) are extremely low, a certain young man was appointed as a beginning teacher. He was assigned a difficult class and immediately began to experience problems. Fundamental to this scenario were the facts that all but 3 of the students (year 7) were significantly below the state average in literacy and numeracy. Some were at least 5 years below.
He was expected to run a normal year 7 program according to the State mandated syllabus. The task was impossible. He was hounded by the deputy principal, the head teacher (mentoring), the head teachers of various faculties, school district advisors and consultants and eventually the principal. At one point I counted no fewer than a dozen different people all pecking on him at the same time.
At one point the principal assigned me to act as a mentor for him. Unfortunately any advice that I could give was trumped by the syllabus cards that everyone else seemed to have. My hand was strong in no trumps. My main advice to him was to provide students with learning tasks that set them up for success. After nearly 5 years of repeated failure most of these students deserved a break. At one point I was demonstrating how to go about this with his class. The deputy principal entered and began taking notes. Her comment was, “This is too simplistic.”
What I was doing was teaching these children how to write a simple sentence. It was simple but not simplistic. I took the students’ work home and analysed it to determine which sentence writing skills they had mastered, from using correct punctuation to correct syntax and spelling. This was year 7. Not one of these students was able to construct a simple sentence, applying all the skills necessary. They were all over the place. What the little exercise did was to identify precisely where the teaching program needed to go and it certainly wasn’t in the direction laid down in the year 7 English syllabus.
These children had been set up to fail repeatedly year after year. The young teacher eventually escaped by retraining as a maths teacher and moved away. And the school continues to be run by a tin pot bullying dictatorship who haven’t the first notion of basic human management theory.
Bullying achieves nothing and is destructive to the fabric of sound educational practice.