• Home
• Tour
  • Take a virtual tour of the school
• What's On
  • Calendar
  • Term Dates
  • Events
    • Rock Eisteddfod
    • School Production
    • Presentation Ball
    • Formals
    • Performing Arts
  • Newsletters
  • Notices
  • Career News
• Curriculum
  • Sub-schools
  • Handbooks
  • Robotics
  • Booklists
  • Science
• Information
  • Contact Us
  • College Profile
  • Values
  • Uniform
  • Canteen Menu
  • Bus Travel
  • Bullying Policy
  • Downloads
  • Site Map
• DVC Users
  • Intranet
  • Webmail
  • Library

The College Response to Bullying

Preamble
What is Bullying?
Ken Rigby's classification: Forms of Bullying
Strategies to Minimise Bullying
Dealing with Bullying When It Occurs
Behaviour Management Model Specific to Bullying
Strategies available where repeat bullying is identified

Preamble

Bullying in all its forms (including harassment) is inconsistent with a healthy school community. The college seeks to encourage a co-operative culture, where individual success and influence need not to be the result of disadvantage to others. Bullying in all its forms is totally unacceptable within the College.

Top

What is bullying?

Bullying is defined as the repeated oppression, psychological or physical of a less powerful person by a more powerful individual or group of persons. It is not the same as conflict, violence or disagreement. although it may involve all of these. Typically at school it may include violence, teasing, name calling, exclusion, consistently disparaging remarks, insulting remarks about gender or sexual orientation about an individual and interference with personal property.

Ken Rigby's classification: Forms of Bullying

Bullying may be perpetrated by an individual student, or a group of students against a student, or even a staff member. Less likely, but possible is bullying by an adult member of the school community.

Strategies to Minimise Bullying

The College will seek to minimise the amount of bullying which takes place within the College community by applying a three pronged approach:

1. Awareness raising and Education among staff and students. This includes:
   1. Professional development of staff about the nature of bullyinh and its consequences, and approaches which have been found to generate a co-operative climate amongst students.
   2. Developing programs with students which:
      1. Raise awareness of the behaviour which constitutes bullying and are unacceptable, the harm caused by such behaviour and the consequences which may be imposed under the College Code of Conduct.
      2. Empower students who are bystanders to prevent or minimise bullying.
      3. Empower Students to report bullying.
2. Support positive participation and building a co-operative community.
   1. Providing inclusive structures which give students access to the College decision making processes.
   2. Generating broad student participation in a wide range of activities which reward co-operative behaviour and enhance the sense of connection which students feel with the college.
   3. Ensuring that staff model co-operative behaviour to students.
3. Seeking wider community support.
   1. Informing parents through publications, parents evenings and other avenues aout the nature of bullying, its consequences, and the strategies adopted by the College in dealing with bullying, and including parents in the consultations which design them.
   2. Encouraging co-operative activities involving parents, students, staff, and other community members.

Dealing with Bullying When It Occurs

Where bullying is revealed it will always be acted on. Predictable, logical, and consistent strategies under the College Code of Conduct will be adopted in the dealing with bullying when it occurs, including:

1. Counselling for the victims and the perpetrators, and possibly targeted programs to assist perpetrators to deal with anger, aggression or other issues which relate to their behaviour.
2. Involvement of parents of both victims and perpetrators, as partners with the College where this is possible.
3. Imposing graduated disciplinary consequences, which make clear the relative seriousness of bullying as an offence.

Behaviour Management Model Specific to Bullying

When a member of the teaching staff directly wirnesses an incident which appears to involve bullying they will:

• Immediately act to stop the incident.
• Declare that the behaviour is unacceptable and explain why.
• As soon as possible, clarify the situation and collect information by
  • Talking to the students involved
  • Taking written accounts from those involved and any witnesses
• Provide suitable support to the victim.
• Respect any issues of confidentiality.
• Be cautious in the use of student names and identity.
• Register the incident in the Bullying Register located in the Assistant Principal's office,
• Inform the year level co-ordinator of the registration in the Bullying Register.

The co-ordinator will directly intervene by:

• Identifying, through the Bullying Register, whether an individual student involved is a repeat bully. In determining this, the co-ordinator will take into account
  • Whether a student's name has appeared in the register before.
  • How recently the student's name appeared in the Bullying Register.
  • The frequency and severity of any previous bullying behaviour.
  • The type of bullying carried out before.
  • Who the student bullied in the past.
• Where an examination of the Bullying Register indicates that a student is/may be a repeat offender, the co-ordinator will go straight to stage 2.

Stage 1

Where a student is not seen to be a repeat offender, the co-ordinator will directly intervene by:

• Alerting, where necessary, home group teachers, subject teachers, yard duty teachers, bus drivers etc. to monitor the interaction between the students involved and/or their friends.
• Telephoning parents of the students involved informing them of the incident and the immediate college procedures that will be followed.
• Sending a letter home to the parents of the students involved informing them of the incident and the imediate college procedures that will be followed.
• Registering in the Bullying Registry that letters have been sent home.
• Organising, where appropriate, for mediation between bully and victim.
• Directing students to undertake appropriate consequences for their actions.

Stage 2

Where the Bullying Register indicates that a student is/may be a repeat offender, the co-ordinator will

• Inform the Assistant Principal
• In consultation with the Assistant Principal
  • Not only decide which of the stage 1 steps above should be followed, but also
  • Contact the parents of both parties, inviting them to attend an interview at the College.
  • Determine, in the parents interview, which of the strategies outlined below should be followed.

Strategies available where repeat bullying is identified:

Top