Dr. Niall Muldoon:

On the point about thinking of three ways to encourage kindness and inclusivity in schools, something that comes to mind is the need to have schools celebrate diversity, whatever the diversity is in a community, make it as normal as possible and celebrate the value of it. That changes the way children see each other, especially if it is started early, and it takes away a lot of the sting that often creates the othering of certain individuals. It is about promoting respect and rights. Children's rights are one of the issues on which we intend to focus. In Wales, children's rights have been put into the education curriculum. It is a way of acknowledging that everybody has a right to be respected and everybody is equal. That should be taught in schools.

On the role of parents in changing the culture of a school, I agree with Dr. Noctor that parents are often not able to push forward. That is why we should legislate for a student-parent charter, which will, in effect, enable a coming together of the whole school community to agree what the plan is for a school and what its culture should be. That will allow the children in junior infants as well as the children in sixth class to say, for example, that they want more gardening, mechanics or music, and parents can have an input into that as well. This changes the focuses so that it is not always about wanting everybody to get As across the board. It allows the whole school community to integrate and it generates a statutory obligation to produce an annual report on whether those targets were reached. It becomes a whole-community engagement and that is when the culture starts to change. Bullying and how it is dealt with could be one of the topics included in the charter, as agreed by the whole school community. It would be a hugely important step forward if we can get that across the line legislatively.