# Transcript

Mary

Well I think one of the interesting things was that that issue was focused, well what we saw was it being played out in the playground. It would have been interesting to see how gender manifested itself within the classroom and whether, you know, given the point that you have raised Ann about boys doing less well apparently compared with girls in the classroom, you know would have been interesting to see whether boys have a voice, more of a voice, how the girls and boys and the teachers manage their relations among boys and girls in the classroom context.

It’s not enough to get the forms and the structures right, but you really have to engage with children in talking about their feelings and their sense of inclusion or exclusion in order to make policy work for all children so that the imposition of a rule doesn’t end up with getting children into a state where they are feeling more and more aggrieved and so you end up having an escalation of conflict rather than an amelioration.

Ann

The ways in which it is done, the process is central, and also being aware that these differences of gender of race and or of ethnicity are not binary opposites. By that I mean that boys and girls, black people, white people, different ethnic groups, aren’t in some ways automatically and only different, that there are also commonalities between them, that these shift from context to context and that we need to take account of those as well, rather than automatically assuming very fixed differences and dealing with these as if a process wasn’t involved.

Mary

That raises very similar issues to those that you need to consider in working with bullying around children because traditionally bullying has been understood as something that one set of children – bullies – do to another set of children – victims – and this leaves out entirely the group process and of course the research that we have done on bullying at Childline and in other places shows that a large proportion of the children who are experiencing bullying, also bully and the best techniques for helping children to get out of a kind of culture of bullying, if you like, are group techniques where you are involving the children in understanding and talking about the losses and the gains and why they are involved in this process.

I mean it is quite interesting if we ask children, why do you think other children bully? They come away with quite a number of psychological explanations that they are children who want to be powerful, they are children who are perhaps being bullied at home, all of these kinds of things. If you ask children why they bully they say, because we don’t like that person and they, like adults, have the sense that if you don’t like someone, then it’s perfectly OK for you to be as nasty as possible to them and, if you like, it’s an ideology that they absorb. And in order to get the relationships changed you have to engage them in thinking about how they think about these kinds of people, this kind of person I don’t like. So it applies in their relations with each other, outside if you like the isms.

Ann

I think that a whole other level of complexities raised by those issues of ideology and difference because if we relate back to the film, these general issues, there was one point in the class discussion where the discussion shifted onto thinking about racism and what causes it, and it was very interesting the ways in which different children came up with different explanations for racism, which may have been rooted in their different positions in terms of gender, in terms of race, but were rooted in differences to do with ideology, their explanations. What I mean by that is that there was one strong explanation given that racism was caused by, if you like, individual pathology, by the children’s background, the fact that they weren’t loved enough at home, they had problems at home and so that racism was just another form of bullying they brought to school. Exactly what you were saying, this individual notion, psychological explanation of bullying and racism being an incidence of bullying.

But that was very much challenged by somebody else who said, well I would want to disagree with that and I think that its not that, its much more, and really he was giving much more structural type explanations for why racism exists and not treating it as individual pathology. And I think that those differences are crucial to work with if one really wants to disrupt within schools, bullying or racism, and I don’t think that they are necessarily the same things, although of course you can have racialised bullying and racism that expresses itself in that way. Esther I mean that seems to go back to what you were both saying at the beginning about this fear of what will happen if you let children loose that somehow something dangerous will happen because they won’t be able to conduct a discussion in a civilised way.

Mary

It’s the Lord of the Flies scenario isn’t it?

Esther

Yes, I mean you’ve talked a lot in that last bit about the importance of children’s involvement in discussion and engaging with children and their ideas. What we saw in the film was some formal processes of consultation and participation that had gone on in setting up the code of behaviour in the first place and as an ongoing process in the sports council, so that children there as I say in a formal way as representatives came along from their class to help make decisions. Were there limitations to that process of participation, I mean what issues did that raise for you?

Mary

The thing that really struck me was what the children were talking about all the time was their behaviour, so that the behaviour of the adults in their world towards them, and towards each other, wasn’t up for their discussion as part of the production of behaviour policy that would apply to the school – we are talking about children’s behaviour not adults’ behaviour – and I would like to have seen that developed. It would have been very interesting to see how children talk about teachers and teachers’ behaviour, and what they want, and what they can respond to, and it’s important for us to progress in that direction because there is evidence to suggest that violence and disorder in school are related as much to how the adults in the school behave and behave towards children as how the children themselves react together.

Esther

But the response of a lot of people to a view that you’ve put forward be, well that’s impossible, it would be chaos in a school that surely you know teachers are the ones trained to be in charge. I mean how would you respond to that, how could a school function if children were allowed to have a say in how teachers behaved?

Mary

If you think about how you conduct within the family a discussion about things that can go wrong and you talk within a family about how well adults can hurt children too, then it is perfectly possible to say if you are a parent, what are the ways that I am behaving that you might not like. I think there is no reason in the world why that in a perfectly low key you know, we are not engaging in revolution here, we are just talking about, well what do you think of the ways that we are behaving as teachers that you really like, and what are the ways that you think we could improve.

And I think it would do two things. One it would I think demonstrate, give feedback to teachers and very useful feedback, so that its not only the inspectors who are telling them when they are doing well and not doing well, but the children as well. But I think it would engage the children in even more ownership of a policy, a way that we have got to live together in this community, and I think that would contribute to their better behaviour. The adults would be being if you like, an even better role model than we have seen in the film up until now.