To ask the Minister of Education, pursuant to evidence provided at the Committee for Education meeting on 22 January, for his assessment of the reason why his Department is unsure of how many schools have an anti-bullying policy in place, as required by the Addressing Bullying in Schools Act (Northern Ireland) 2016.

The Addressing Bullying in Schools Northern Ireland Act (NI) 2016 (the Act), which came into effect in 2021, requires schools to record incidents or alleged incidents of bullying type behaviour (BTB), their motivation and their outcome. Each school’s Board of Governors (BoG) has responsibility to oversee the implementation of the Act in their school. The Act places a statutory duty on a BoG collectively to take responsibility for the development, implementation, monitoring and periodic review of the school’s Addressing-Bullying policies and procedures. The legislation does not include the requirement for schools to share their policies with the Department.

Officials are progressing work on a number of fronts with a view to ensuring the Department has access to comprehensive data in order to better understand implementation of, and compliance with, the Act.

The Department has included a range of questions in relation to bullying type behaviour for the first time in the 2024 School Omnibus Survey. These questions covered the awareness of the Act and its statutory duties, effectiveness of implementation, and BTB methods and motivations. This information will allow the Department to understand more about the impact of the Act and how best to support schools to effectively implement the Act.

ETI inspectors, in all inspections, evaluate how well schools meet the needs of their pupils through the lens of ‘Health, wellbeing and keeping safe’. As part of inspection, inspectors therefore review all pastoral policies and guidance within a school, as set out in the Department guidance, Safeguarding and Child Protection in Schools. Officials have also engaged with the ETI to ensure the inclusion of questions as part of a wider ETI pilot from September – December 2024, to help determine how schools are fulfilling their statutory obligations in relation to implementing the Act, in terms of recording of all incidents of bullying, development, implementation, monitoring and review of Addressing-Bullying policies and procedures.

Schools are presently required to complete a Bullying Concern Assessment Form (BCAF) on the School Information Management System for each incident of Bullying Type Behaviour. The BCAF records statutorily required data however, presently this data cannot be collated or anonymised. The BCAF is being digitised as part of the Education Information Solutions (EdIS) digital change programme. The Department is starting to explore the potential opportunities in relation to data presented by the digitisation of the BCAF, which include the potential to better measure how schools are meeting the requirements of the Act.