| Reviewing your anti-bullying policy |
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Does your organisation have an anti-bullying policy? How long has it been since your policy was reviewed? If a significant amount of time has passed since your policy was written or revised, it is worth considering undertaking a policy review. What is a significant amount of time? Three years is the maximum amount of time you should leave between policy reviews. If it has been less than three years but there have been significant changes to your organisation since or if there have been significant political or legislative changes, then it is also worth considering a review. The following steps are a general guide to reviewing the anti-bullying policy in your organisation and include key points that you need to consider to successfully review your policy. This process follows the 'Better Policy Making’ approach which respectme provides further information and training on. Step 1 – Form a Working Group Form a policy review working group. From a better policy making perspective it is vital that this group is as diverse as possible. The group should include at least - a receiver of the policy (a young person and a parent if possible), a policy implementer (this may be a teacher, worker or other member of staff depending on your organisation), a member of senior management and a member of the community (for example a community police officer, a community planner or a youth worker). The person who originally wrote the policy does not have to be a member of the group. When putting your working group together you must consider timings of meetings and venue size. These factors may dictate the size or structure of your group. It would be possible and sometimes advisable to have a couple of sub-groups, for example if you want input from children and young people but cannot find anyone willing to attend numerous adult-centric meetings. There does need to be consistency and effectives methods of communication between all groups however. It is likely that you will have easy access to these people and the development of this group presents an opportunity for innovation. If your organisation is a secondary school then maybe the cluster primaries are looking to review their anti-bullying policies and this can be done together. If your organisation regularly uses a building not belonging to you then the owner or convenor of the building may wish to be involved (as may any other agencies that use the building). Look beyond the ‘usual suspects'. Can you invite a representative from the bus company who drive your pupils to school? Is there a community activist or councillor who would be interested in being involved? A lead person for the policy should be named and it would be helpful to designate roles to each of the group members, if possible, to exploit individual skills, areas of interest or areas of expertise. If the current policy has measures for evaluation it is also important to note these. Step 2 – Read the Policy As a group, take time to get to know the current anti-bullying policy, as it is written. An open discussion should be encouraged on the general feel of the policy and how successful the group feel that the policy has been to date. Decide as a group how you are going to consult with others on how successful the current policy has been. Try at this stage to write an estimated time-line of the review process and how often the group are likely to need to meet. This will depend entirely on the size of your organisation and your commitment to consultation. Step 2 b. - Equality and Diversity Impact Assess the policy It is a legal requirement that you do an impact assessment on new or revised policies for likely impacts on children and young people from equality communities. The language, tone and accessibility of the current policy must be considered. respectme would advocate the use of an Equality and Diversity Impact Assessment. This will guide the Working Group on its consideration of the impact or potential impact of the policy upon various, relevant sections of society and potential impact on children's rights. This will go someway to highlighting strengths and weaknesses and potentially explaining the successes or failures of the policy within different sections of society. The Working Group will have to respond to the issues raised by the Equality and Diversity Impact Assessment and it is vital that this is evidenced. Step 3 - Consultation Those involved with devising, implementing and receiving the policy need to be consulted with in order to gain a perspective on how the current policy has performed. Has it achieved what it was designed to achieve? This consultation can be done in a number of ways. You can issue questionnaires, embark upon one-to-one or group interviews, arrange for open group discussions, invite people along to a question and answer session or arrange a video box on your premises. One approach might not suit everyone you want to consult with, so a variety of approaches may need to be developed. Examples of this are below:
Carefully consider what you want to ask your consultation group. The Working Group must decide how far they want to implement suggestions made through consultation. It is also important at this stage to plan how the Working Group is going to feedback the results of the consultation to those consulted with. Step 4 – Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses Armed with the information from the consultation and from the Equality and Diversity Impact Assessment, the Working Group must identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current policy. Questions that the Working Group could consider asking are:
Step 5 – Making Appropriate Changes to the Policy
Finally, the whole process of review including consultation findings and the Equality and Diversity Impact Assessment should be documented and stored for archive. |