Next week is UK & IOM National Anti-bullying Week. As with other schools across the UK and the Isle of Man we will have a range of awareness raising activities and initiatives around school to promote anti-bullying, this will include an Odd-socks Day for Anti-bullying on Friday 15th November.
As part of our Anti-bullying initiatives we will be asking all of our students to take part in completing an Anti-bullying Alliance Questionnaire. More information about this survey is included below and all parents will be contacted on Wednesday 6th November and asked to give their consent for their children to take part in the survey.
Information for parents about the questionnaire
All Together: united against bullying
A long with all of the Island’s schools, St. Ninian’s, is embarking on the All Together anti-bullying programme provided by the Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA). ABA is a charity that works to reduce bullying in schools. It is based at the UK National Children’s Bureau (NCB).
In order to make sure that we are doing all we can to prevent and reduce bullying and to improve pupil wellbeing, we want to find out the levels of bullying in our school and to find out how our pupils feel about school. For this reason, we are inviting pupils at our school in years 7 to 10 to complete an anonymous survey. We will then ask pupils to complete the questionnaire again at the end of the programme.
The following information is important since it will explain about the survey and how the information gathered will be used.
Why has my child been asked to take part and what will they do?
The survey has been specially designed by the Anti-Bullying Alliance for all pupils in years 3 and above. It is an online survey which should take about 15 minutes to complete. The answers your child gives to the questionnaire will not be seen by their friends, teachers or you unless your child chooses an adult to help them complete the questionnaire.
Are there downsides to taking part?
There are no known risks or disadvantages to taking part. The survey has been very carefully designed so that it will be easy for children to answer. If there are questions they don’t like, they can leave these out. They will also be able to stop answering the survey questions at any time if they wish. Completing the survey should not cause them any distress. However, if they should become upset, school staff will be on hand to offer support. Information will also be provided about other sources of advice and help, e.g. talking to their family, calling ChildLine and so on.
What are the possible benefits of taking part?
The Senior and Pastoral teams will receive an anonymised report of the survey findings for their whole year group that will help them review and support pupil wellbeing. Your child’s responses will help shape the approaches we use as a school when trying to prevent and tackle bullying. For example, it will help us to make sure that the school’s anti-bullying policy covers all the important areas that concern children in our school. By asking these questions, pupils will also know we take incidents of bullying seriously as a school and that we care about our pupils’ wellbeing.
What will happen with the information that your child gives us?
All information collected will be kept confidential and will be encrypted and carefully stored by on a secure system held by the Anti-Bullying Alliance in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018, the UK's implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Neither schools, nor the Anti-Bullying Alliance will ever have access to pupils’ individual completed questionnaires – only year group or whole year reports which are sent back to them with anonymous information.
For further details of how data about your child will be collected, stored and analysed, please see the Data Protection Privacy Notice (Appendix 1).
Schools will not have access to individual completed questionnaires and whole year group reports will be sent back to them anonymously.
Some of the headline results may be shared with key people, like the school’s governors and Ofsted. Again this information is anonymised and it will not be possible to identify any individual pupils.
What we need parents/carers to do
We hope that you have found this information useful and that you will be happy for your child to be invited to take part in this survey. Please follow instructions in the email that will be sent to you on 6th November to give your consent.