Ms Stella O'Malley:

Further to Dr. Noctor's point, I think the schools can go on the front foot. In September at the beginning of the school year, schools need to send a letter to all the parents stating that there will be bullying, and that it is very important that the parents acknowledge that their child might be a bully and that is okay. There is a kind of vilification of bullying and parents are so frightened that their child might be bullied that they completely deny it. The schools need to say, "We're socialising our children. One day they will grow up. In the meantime, they might behave very badly and that's okay because we'll help them to become better people." It is a process and we need honesty and moral courage in this process.

As Dr. Noctor said, the way to do that is to get buy-in at the beginning. More people need to sign up to the bullying policies and they need to be more prominent than they are. Rather than being in the background somewhere on a website, there needs to be a conscious decision that we are going to create a culture of not only upstanding but an acknowledgement that bullying will take place and we will hopefully respond sufficiently. Often the important point about the bullying programmes is their execution. It is not good enough just to write a bullying programme; it needs much more depth than that.