Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 2:12 pm on 27 November 2019.
Thank you, Paul. All schools must, by law, have a school behaviour policy in place, and the 'Rights, respect, equality' statutory anti-bullying guidelines outline the Welsh Government's expectation that all schools in Wales will have a specific anti-bullying policy, setting out how the school will record and monitor incidents of bullying to help take proactive steps to challenge that. So, a crucial part of our new guidance is exactly that. It includes mandatory reporting of bullying incidents, so that schools and local authorities are better equipped with the data that they need; they can monitor trends over time; and they can evaluate the impact of the policies that they have in place in their own school. So, we hope, as a result of this new guidance, there will be a more robust set of data and recording, going forward, which was—I'd be the first person to admit—missing in the old system.