Dr. Paul Downes:

To add to a number of the points, working with the principal is a key aspect so we need the professional development of principals regarding social and emotional education. We have restorative practice schools here where there are whole-school approaches. We are not that far away from it in many of our schools and there are a number of schools where we can see models of real openness. Conflict is not avoidable in schools, conflict is part of life, and it is a question of how those conflicts are mediated.

Professor Cefai made a point that I want to amplify, which is that social and emotional education is not opposed to academic learning. The academic research points out that social and emotional education improves academic learning because it involves a deeper engagement with the material, deeper connection to life experience and deeper processes of questioning. For example, in English they are trying to understand characters’ motivations in a novel or they are trying to understand empathy in history. Drama and role-play is something which is part of the primary curriculum and can be used as a method across subjects, such as in history, religion or ethics. There are ways in which role-play helps the key social and emotional education goals, which are empathy and perspective taking.

On the point on the ideal features of a school, we can almost sense this when we go into schools. One of my roles is to go around to different schools on school placement, and I can see the tangible climate in the school where all the school staff are engaged with the school process, they are happy to chat with the children and they talk at the level of the children, so there is democracy in action in the school environment. It is about all of those whole-school aspects.

If I am being asked what other layers there are on that, I have already argued for a whole-school committee to drive through change at a whole-school level, not just one champion but a committee, and to have emotional counsellors and therapists onsite. What I would add to that is a vision of a school community lifelong learning centre, where the school is available after school hours, where there can be after-school activities that children want to stay for and where parents are engaged. The role of the arts in regard to bullying prevention and social and emotional education is usually underdeveloped. There are many different multidimensional lenses to build on.

I would add that around secondary school level, many of the wider programmes have been shown to be less effective for older teenagers. There is a risk that overly didactic approaches will get the teenagers to react against it, and they will do the opposite. There is quite a lot of research, even going back to the 1970s, that if we try to programme youth into things, they will go the opposite way. We have to be careful around that aspect also. With older children, it is about co-constructing meaning-making material.

In our report for the commission, we also emphasised how youth would have an input into curricular materials. In the international research, one of the key features of successful bullying programmes was video. Videos were actively developed by minority groups who were victims of bullying to show what it is like in their life experience. To have different minority voices come through in videos is another dimension that international research says has a key impact for bullying prevention.