Anti-Bullying

What is bullying?

Bullying is repeated and intentional intimidation carried out by a ‘more powerful’ person or group of people (older, bigger, more popular, etc) in order to cause physical or emotional hurt to their victim. Bullying is not just a phenomenon of students associated with the school who are bullying each other because bullying occurs on teachers and school support workers whether by students, parents or other staff.

Types of Bullying	Examples of bullying behaviour
Physical	Pushing, hitting, kicking, spitting or threatening violence on the victim in school or after school.
Verbal	Name calling, spreading nasty rumours, cruel teasing or sarcastic comments.
Emotional	Humiliating, excluding, tormenting or use threatening gestures.
Racist	Put-downs directed to new or an established community group, using racist taunts, gestures or graffiti.
Sexual	Abusive sexual comments, unwanted contact, homophobic slurs or gestures.
Cyber/Online	Texting or phoning threats, setting up hate websites, posting images and images that belittle the victim or chat room misuse.

At Vale of York Academy we are committed to safeguarding our students and staff by providing a caring and friendly environment to work and learn. Bullying of any kind is not acceptable in school or around the school. If bullying does occur we expect all students who are victims or witnesses to the incident to report this to a member of staff so it can be dealt with promptly and effectively. The school strives through our ethos and citizenship, PSHE, careers education programmes and by the school working within the Equality Act 2010 to prevent any instances of bullying before they occur by discussing the subject freely and openly. However, whenever a group of people are together there may be instances of bullying behaviour. The school has a clear procedure so that such instances can be reported and dealt with effectively to help victims as well as the perpetrators of bullying.

If you’d like to report a safeguarding issue or have concerns regarding bullying, you can do so by clicking this link. Anything you write will be sent anonymously.

To help meet our objectives we ask parents and carers to work with us to combat the ever increasing issues linked to facebook and other social networking sites.

For more on e-safety click here