Isn't it crazy that schools don't have to report how much bullying is going on?

The Chief Children's Commissioner thinks so too, which is why she’s saying that it should be mandatory for schools to provide regular, publicly-available numbers.

No wonder some parents feel their school isn’t doing enough about bullying. Because, if you don’t have to report it, it's much easier to sweep under the carpet, isn’t it?

Thankfully, our kids never had any serious problems with bullying. And I'm pretty sure I didn’t, either, when I was at school.

I had a few run-ins and there were probably some kids I knew to avoid. And one of the two high schools I went to in Dunedin was pretty violent. But I'm pretty sure I wasn’t the victim of bullying. Unlike a lot of other people who were or are.

Although, maybe I can't say that, because we don’t know the numbers. And I don’t think we have a hope in hell of doing anything meaningful about school bullying until we do.

Because, at the moment, we only hear about individual cases.

A couple of years back, I remember Ashburton College being in the news on a regular basis, with parents and students talking about bullying being bad there.

And I remember, of course, the school trotting out the usual lines about how it takes bullying seriously. Which, to be fair, it probably did. I haven’t come across a school yet that turns a completely blind eye to it. But, because they don't have to keep records and numbers and share them with the Ministry of Education and make them publicly-available, we don't how seriously schools really take it.

Claire Achmad, the Chief Children’s Commissioner, is saying today: “I am keen to see regular, publicly reported data about bullying in schools, so we can continue to understand the scale and nature of the problem for children and young people.” 

She’s being polite and is saying she’d “like” to see it. I’m saying that we have to see it.

Because, imagine if you could access this kind of data. Do you think schools would make sure they did everything possible about bullying? Of course they would. They would probably do a lot more than some do at the moment. Some schools will be better than others.

I see that the secondary school teachers union is acknowledging that it’s a bit of a “blind spot”.

Chris Abercrombie of the Post-Primary Teachers Association, says doing more about bullying could be part of the answer to the problem we’ve got with so many kids not turning up at school. Which makes sense. Because, if you’re being bullied at school, that’s the last place you going to want to be, isn’t it?

He says there's no national plan for dealing with bullying. And that, for me, is the gap that needs filling. As well as mandatory reporting of bullying, which is what the Chief Children's Commissioner is calling for.

Because this lack of a national plan means individual school boards have the job of dealing with it. I know. I served on a school board for about six years and it was on us to decide what to do when a case of bullying came up.

So every school board in the country is doing its own thing and they are under no compulsion to share any intel with the Ministry of Education and parents.

And, until they do, we will be in the dark as to how much of a problem bullying actually is.

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