A content analysis of school anti-bullying policies in England: signs of progress

ABSTRACT

Schools in England are required to have an anti-bullying policy. A revised 42-item scoring scheme was used to report a content analysis of 200 anti-bullying policies. On average, school policies had 61% of items. Chi-square comparisons found an increase in policy coverage from 2008 to 2022, notably for mentioning cyber bullying and many types of bias-based bullying; but comparisons are limited by different sampling procedures. Despite good coverage in some areas, fewer than 25% of policies mentioned responsibilities of other school staff, suggested how to help the pupil(s) doing the bullying to change their behaviour, gave advice to parents about bullying, or discussed specific powers to deal with cyberbullying and out-of school bullying. For 131 schools, correlations of self-report scores on bullying victimisation and perpetration with the overall policy score were negative but very small. Ways to improve school policy coverage, and the impact they may have, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullying
• victim
• schools
• England
• policy
• content-analysis

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Martha Evans and Liffy McDonnell at the AntiBullyingAlliance for giving access to the list of United Against Bullying schools; Susanne Robinson and Catherine Culbert for providing the bullying victimization and perpetration scores for each school; and to all of them and also to Noel Purdy for comments on the revision of the scoring scheme. Special thanks to Goldsmiths Research Internship Programme (GRIP) for organising and funding the internship for Ifraah Kidwai.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.