Professor James O'Higgins Norman:

I suppose the operative ethos of a school is an important part of how people experience school. There has not been a huge amount of recent research on that topic. There was a glut of it about 15 years ago and everybody was very concerned about it, including me, but there has not been a lot on that in recent years. I will go back to what we were talking about earlier about the school sitting within the whole of society and the whole education approach, where we look at the school as being influenced by society and sometimes not quite catching up with where society is or not reflecting the beliefs of parents or vice versa. School culture definitely has a role to play in bullying. Dr. Mazzone and Dr. Gorman will now chip in and say something about that.