Wednesday 30th March 2011:

Today, I visited William Ransom Primary School. I was able to speak to the head teacher as well as some Year 6 pupils. I firstly spoke to Mrs Driver, the head teacher, and she told me all about what they need to do when a bullying incident occurs and what they do to try and prevent bullying in the first place. I’ve also analysed my notes from what the head teacher said and tomorrow I will look at the student’s responses.

There are many schemes in place, such as ‘playground buddies’. This is where 2 pupils are selected for the day to be the ‘playground buddies’ - they wear bands and then other pupils are able to play with these people if they have no one else to play with, etc. I think this is a great idea because then no one can feel left out and there will always be someone to go to (eg: if you’re being bullied).

The head teacher told me that usually the bullying incidents, which do occur (which isn’t often), involve ‘name-calling’. This is probably because they’re just children saying things without thinking of the consequences, etc, and I thought that perhaps this would be the case. However, this shouldn’t therefore be the case for teenagers, however, ‘name-calling’/ insults does happen quite frequently with this age group, so perhaps this doesn’t go with age.

One thing, which was really interesting, was that over the past year she has felt less in control because of ‘cyber bullying’. If this involves ‘hotmail’ accounts instead of the school accounts, then there isn’t much that the school can do about it. Usually parents bring these issues to the school, but there is nothing they can do because it’s outside school and out of their control. This is quite sad and definitely something current and something which will probably continue into the future. Perhaps I could look at this further as this is an issue which is relevant today and relates particularly well to my target audience of teenagers.

Furthermore she mentioned that when they give assemblies, etc, they try to focus on the positive (eg: ‘making friends), rather than the negative (eg: bullying). This is an interesting viewpoint to take. However, this may be more relevant to children who are still in the stage of learning how to make friends, etc. Perhaps teenagers are past this stage and need more negative, ‘shocking’ messages in order to understand.

One last thing she mentioned was that every so often one of the teachers gives an assembly about these things and that he demonstrates this by using a tube of toothpaste which he then squirts out all over the floor. The children are always shocked by this but then he goes on to say ‘once you say something, you can’t take it back’ – like the toothpaste, once it’s out, that’s it. I thought this was a really good way to show this to the students and that I could take a few visuals from this. I could also think of a few other similar things (eg: once you fry an egg, it can’t go back to being encased by shell, etc).

Target for today: Visit and talk to head teacher and pupils at William Ransom Primary School and ask them about bullying experiences and opinions, etc.

Target for tomorrow: Analyse notes from the student’s answers and work into copy of drawing (‘The Anthropomorphic Cabinet’).