Dr. Colman Noctor:

I thank the Deputy for his question. Parents play a huge role in this. As well as advocating for the child who is undergoing the bullying, they need to agitate until that is resolved as opposed to letting it go. The establishment of a culture where bullying is not tolerated has to involve parents because if one has a child who gets in trouble for mistreating or excluding another child, there is an emphasis that parents will dismiss that as unimportant or will not follow through. The number of children who experience bullying suggests there are many more children who bully than we know about or come in contact with. It would be good if parents agreed to buy in in the first year of primary school and the first year of secondary school, for example. I mean that if bullying occurs that the parent of the child who is the perpetrator and the parent of the child who is the victim will take an active role in following through on that. If teachers get involved, there is a "not my Johnny" approach and when that happens, it is incredibly difficult to have a consistent approach across the board. We need parental buy-in and ownership of the issues from that start.

Part and parcel of signing up to a bullying policy is that the parents of a child who is at the centre of a bullying issue should get involved in trying to be consistent in hammering home the school message of zero tolerance of that.