By Rachel Wood
rsowood@hotmail.com
The issue of bullying in the workplace has been under the spotlight over the last couple of weeks, as the media, for example, UK newspaper, The Telegraph, have grappled with BBC Radio 2 presenters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s unfeeling behaviour towards Andrew Sachs.
Bullying remains a key issue in schools.
Anti-bullying policies in schools too are continually being re-defined and re-evaluated as the government seeks to wipe out what can be hugely detrimental to a child’s learning and future life.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) supports schools in designing these anti-bullying policies – see background piece for more details.
In 1996, Educational consultant, Dr Carrie Herbert, sought to help the victims of bullying by setting up a charity to educate children who were missing school to avoid the bullies.
The first Red Balloon School
Dr Herbert told BBC Radio 4’s ‘Midweek’ presenter, Libby Purves, about the story behind the first Red Balloon School.
Click here to listen to the podcast.
‘The Mail’s 2008 Inspirational Woman of the Year’ had been running an educational consultancy in 1995, whilst doing some anti-bullying work in schools, when she “kept coming across stories…of a child who had left a school because they had been bullied”.
Over the course of a year, Dr Herbert grew more frustrated at what she saw as the abandonment of bullied children:
“My rage is at the fact that we live in what is considered to be a first world country and we allow these children to drop through a net and nobody seems to pick them up and they [then] languish in their homes too frightened to leave their bedrooms”.
After giving an anti-bullying lecture, Dr Herbert was visited at her Cambridge home by “two traumatised parents who sat on [her] sofa with their daughter who had attempted suicide” and asked her for help.
The former English teacher immediately agreed to start teaching their daughter, Jenny, from Monday morning, and thus transform her house into a school.
Dr Herbert’s transformed home
In an interview with the UK newspaper, The Mail, Dr Herbert recalls: “Even as I was saying those words, I was wondering how on earth I was going to turn my small Victorian townhouse into a school in less than 48 hours”.
Dr Herbert quickly organised for a friend of hers, who was a teacher, to teach Jenny maths and physics and advertised for an art teacher’s post in the local newsagents.
A desk was placed in the sitting room, and as she told Radio 4 – “…my bedroom became the maths room, and my ensuite bathroom became the science room”. Her attic was then transformed into her bedroom.
Carrie Herbert’s resourcefulness is well-illustrated when she recalls the children coming across a dead mole on a walk, and suggests to the biology teacher to “cut that up and let the children have a look and see”. She laughs saying, “The mole ended up being cut up on the kitchen table”.
Within seven months, Jenny had nine other classmates, all of whom were aged between 12 and 16 years and had been severely bullied at their respective schools.
The school takes up to 15 pupils at one time, and when Radio 4 presenter, Libby Purves, asked Dr Herbert about the relationships between the pupils, she replied: “…they make hugely strong bonds across class, across race, across academic ability…it’s like a family”.
Since the Red Balloon School first started in November 1996, more than a hundred pupils have been helped, before later being reintegrated into mainstream school, in most cases after a year.
Dr Herbert is delighted at how successfully her former pupils have moved on to establish happy lives and budding careers. A former Red Balloon student graduated with a first from a London university last Summer.
Two other Red Balloon schools have been estabished in Norwich and Harrow, North-West London.
Fundraising has begun in order to open a new centre in Liverpool in memory of James Bulger.
Click here to go to the background article on school’s anti-bullying policies.
Click here to view my blog.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)
