Scottish Catholic Observer

Roisin King, a teacher at St Francis Xavier’s Primary in Falkirk, helped develop the project along with pupils, teachers and parents from St Andrew’s, St Francis Xavier’s, St Bernadette’s, St Joseph’s, St Patrick’s, St Mary’s and Sacred Heart primaries and St Mungo’s Secondary. She said the input of pupils to the programme was key to its success.

“We are very fortunate in our cluster as we all work closely together and have a shared mission statement and improvement plan,” she explained. “I worked with parents, pupils and other teachers and members of management from our cluster schools in order to agree on this policy. I was very impressed at the engagement from pupils throughout this process. They gave a great insight into what would work for them and what they would like to see in place in schools. It was because of them that we decided to develop a poster for pupils.”

Two pupil anti-bullying ambassadors, P7 pupils Aiden McCreath and Orla Cannon from P6 explained how they got involved. “It was good to help out with the bullying policy because it’s not fair that some people are being treated like that,” Orla said. “It was good to hear other people’s viewpoints on bullying. It was good because there were a lot of different people there to give their opinion.

“I enjoyed doing assembly for the whole school to tell them all about it. It’s important to have a policy because if someone is being bullied they know there is a way to stop it. It gives guidelines for those who are being bullied, those who see bullying behaviour and those who are displaying bullying behaviour.”

Aiden McCreath said he wanted ‘to help protect other young people from being bullied.’

“It was fun to work with people from other schools,” he said. “I know from my own experience how people feel when they are getting bullied and I wanted to help. It is important to have an anti-bullying policy because it tells people what to do if they are being bullied and where they can find help.”

The policy focuses on encouraging pupils to challenge any bullying behaviour they see and making them understand it is not acceptable.