Fiona O'Loughlin (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Madigan. First, I acknowledge that schools in general are putting a great deal of time and effort into proactive strategies to ensure that school environments are as welcoming and inclusive as possible. We must, however, also acknowledge that bullying exists and is happening in the physical form, although less so now, and in the shape of cyberbullying. Some of the reports we saw during the pandemic have given cause for major concern concerning the rise in cyberbullying and its impact among young people. We must be watchful of this issue as a society. We must work together with school communities to ensure that we are tackling bullying behaviour and encouraging and supporting our young people who are being bullied to enable them to be resilient and to be able to deal with it.Of course, the bystander has a very important role in this. The overall culture of schools is important in terms of their values. It is the case that diversity and respect for all is taught in almost every school, in addition to an understanding of, and addressing and standing up to, prejudice.

The anti-bullying policy in schools was developed eight years ago now and needs to be reviewed. It needs to include particular direction on homophobic and transphobic bullying and racism. The world has changed an awful lot in the past eight years. It is the prerogative of every individual school to have an anti-bullying policy, but it is very important that the Department of Education clearly outlines what that should be. We need to change the language around it, which does not have to be negative such as "anti-bullying". We can use positive language such as "transforming lives', etc. Many good programmes are in place in different schools, which have been rolled out by different patron bodies. If we had a roadmap to different types of strategies, we would go a long way.

We need to take a number of steps. Any approach to bullying has to include the voice of students. It is also important that parents are very actively involved. We need an online safety commissioner. The time for talking about it is over. We need to have one in place and we need to examine digital literacy for our students as well as online safety programmes. The emotional and therapeutic supports that are badly needed in schools need to be rolled out on a more constant basis. Every school should have access to a counsellor or a relevant professional. We all hear about the significant adult in young people's lives, but teachers need to have a lot of extra support to enable them to be that significant person.

There have been issues with data. There are two schools of thought on this, but at the moment the Department does not collect data on bullying incidents, the type of bullying and so on. It is important we do that for monitoring in future.