Approaches which address emotional intelligence have the potential to impact positively on bullying in schools, as well as reducing anti-social behaviour in communities, by improving relationships among young people. In this two-part article, we would like to consider how giving young people space to reflect on their attitudes towards others and how they view themselves and their futures can help to address bullying.
Attention given to school bullying has risen exponentially in recent decades. Since the early work of Dan Olweus in Sweden in the 1960s/70s, academic research has addressed everything from the different human actors involved in bullying incidents, most recently the role of bystanders, to the diverse approaches employed to tackle bullying.
The high-profile KiVa project, which originated in Finland (Smith, 2021), is currently being piloted in Wales in both primary and secondary schools (Axford et al, 2020).
Despite discussions at international, national, and local level and annual national anti-bullying weeks, bullying still presents challenges for most schools. A 2020 survey suggests that around 25% of young people experience bullying in the UK (Ditch the Label, 2020) and the Covid-19 pandemic has raised its own bullying-related challenges (Shaw, 2020).
So, what can be done about it? This article suggests that approaches which focus on emotional intelligence have the potential to impact positively on bullying in schools by improving relationships among young people.
A second article from the authors (due to publish on April 5) will address how this approach has also been found to reduce anti-social behaviour and offending in local communities.
The beginning
This article starts at the beginning because the beginning is where the experience and relationship to crime, albeit petty crime, began for the second author. Graham Moore grew up on the Woodchurch Estate in Birkenhead, Merseyside. Here, anti-social behaviour proliferated, was admired and replicated. Inevitably, many heads were turned by the lure of drugs and crime. Graham’s journey into teaching started here.
In the interview for his PGCE teacher training course, he was asked why he wanted to become a teacher. He told the truth: “To stop young people making the same mistakes that I did.” He was awarded a place there and then and so began a lifetime of helping young people try to avoid the same pitfalls that he and his friends experienced. After 15 years of teaching, setting up humanutopia was a natural step to continue this work.
The work of humanutopia
Humanutopia is an education social enterprise based on the Wirral in Merseyside which has helped more than 500,000 young people in more than 1,000 schools in seven countries over 17 years. Humanutopia’s programmes develop the emotional intelligence of young people to help them realise the importance of mindset and how this can impact on their relationships with others and their future.
Emotional intelligence was originally recognised by Gardner (1983 in Gardner, 2011). It is: “The individual’s ability to understand emotions in self and others.” (Smith et al, 2015).
In 1990 Salovey and Mayer (cited in Smith et al, 2015) identified five different strands of emotional intelligence:
- Understanding feelings
- Managing feelings
- Self-motivation
- Handling relationships
- Empathy
All of these strands are represented in humanutopia’s flagship programme “Who am I?”. The impact of these programmes has been extraordinary at times, with all manner of life-changing stories. An overview of the programme is provided first in this article, before lessons learned from this and other anti-bullying work are considered.
Humanutopia takes a whole year-group for one whole school day, typically around 200 to 300 students, in a sports or assembly hall. If you were to sit at the back and watch, you would see that the first half-hour is a lot of fun. When you see it in the context of the whole day, you realise its importance: it engages the students and it builds trust with the facilitators; the programme creates a safe environment where all views are heard, without judgement.
Who has had their bin filled?
The day is divided into three sessions. The first aims to help young people reflect on their past and who they have become; more importantly, how they have become that person. A powerful bin analogy is central to this.
The team holds up a large school bin and begin to throw waste paper piece by piece into it. At the same time, they say names that young people get called in school. Tension mounts in as students recognise names they have been called or have called other people and they are asked to stand if they have been called names. In almost every school, almost every student stands up. Students are then invited to stay standing if they feel able to talk about the impact.
At one school, the third author was present when a 13-year-old girl was standing in the front row. Tears were starting to run down her cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away. One of the humanutopia facilitators handed her the microphone and gently asked her to explain what was happening.
What happened next was very profound. She said: “I’m being bullied by other people in this year group because I’m not socialising with them, on social media, after school. The reason I’m not doing that is that I’m caring for my mother, who is dying of cancer.”
The room was silent. From behind, some children were shifting, uncomfortably, in their seats. A couple put their foreheads in their hands. Then, a boy who was sat at the back pushed his seat back, making a noise on the wooden floor. Everyone turned to look. He stood up, walked to where the girl was stood crying and hugged her. The boy went back to his seat and the girl sat down, comforted by her friend who was sat next to her.
Humanutopia then passed the microphone to a male student who had remained standing. With emotion, he said: “I am being bullied by other people because I have poor eyesight and I have to wear these glasses. I want to achieve good grades, and have a good career, but there are other people here who make my life a misery because I have weak eyes.”
A pin drop can be heard as young people stand and each bravely describes how the names they have been called and the actions of others have sapped their confidence and self-belief.
Any observers see two things happen simultaneously: first, young people speaking from the heart about something that has held them back and, second, how a huge audience of teenagers sit and listen in respectful silence, with empathy and understanding.
Who fills bins?
In the second session, students are invited to speak into the microphone if they have bullied other students. This is done in a non-judgemental way. The room changes as students realise the impact of their actions, whether inadvertent or intentional.
In one session, a male student stood up and said: “That guy who’s just talked about his eyesight. He’s talking about me. Because I do that to him every day.”
He said: “I’m going to come over there mate, I’m going to shake you by the hand, and I promise that I will never do that to you again.” He made his way through the crowd, took the other student’s hand and there was a big round of applause.
Suddenly, barriers start to be broken down across the group. The facilitators explain that their self-image and “behaviour-to-belong” is impacting on their school life. They show them that it is good to be different and important to respect others.
Daring to dream
In the last session of the day, young people are encouraged to sit in “The Dream Chair” and say what they are going to do with their lives. For some it is the first time that they have dared to dream about their own futures.
At one school, one student told the third author that this third session in particular had had an impact: “I was the biggest bully in my year group. Violence was an everyday part of my life. I had already been excluded from the other four schools, and I had just been put on notice that I was a week away from being excluded from this school.
“What humanutopia said didn’t really resonate with me until that session in the afternoon, when they talked about what the pathways to prison would look like at my age.
“I realised I was right in the middle of that road and was going to spend a lot of my life in prison … I just didn’t want that … And so, I came in the following day, I apologised to the staff, and I determined that I would change”.
The boy was now in the sixth form and head-of-year.
Conclusion
A detailed review of the work of humanutopia has been written by McGregor (2017) and in a small-scale evaluation of the programme conducted by the first author, which included interviews with senior leaders, the programme was found to have had a positive impact on school life, including improved student attendance and a noticeable improvement in student relationships for a period of time after. Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) Nudge Theory highlights the importance of reminders to encourage pro-social behaviour, however, and any anti-bullying programme should be considered within this context.
Reflecting on the work of humanutopia alongside the wider body of work on school bullying, therefore, school leaders might consider the following for questions for their school:
- Is there an environment which encourages bystanders to speak out?
- Is there a robust whole-school approach to behaviour and rewards?
- Is there an effective, evidence-led anti-bullying policy which is implemented consistently?
- Are students given sufficient opportunity to reflect on their relationships with others and to develop interpersonal skills, including empathy?
- Are students reminded appropriately about school anti-bullying and behaviour policies?
In our second article – which you can find here – we will focus on addressing why bullying in schools is not just a school problem, but it can impact on anti-social behaviour and crime in local areas. The third author first encountered humanutopia when they were responsible for policing a quarter of the county of Northamptonshire and the next article focuses on this experience; of how addressing bullying in schools using emotional intelligence can impact positively on both behaviour inside school and within the community.
- Dr Mandy Shaw is a senior lecturer in criminology at Leeds Beckett University. She has more than 25 years’ experience in research and teaching in higher education. Her most recent research, on the bullying of school teachers, was presented at the World Anti-Bullying Forum in Stockholm, Sweden in November 2021.
- Graham Moore is director of humanutopia and a former teacher whose work is the focus of this article. Read Graham’s previous articles for SecEd via https://bit.ly/seced-moore
- Vaughan Clarke is a retired police officer with 35 years of service. The last four years of his career were spent working for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, inspecting police forces on – among other things – their approach to problem-solving and reducing crime.
Further information & resources
- Anti-Bullying Alliance: https://anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/
- Axford et al: The effectiveness of the KiVa Bullying Prevention Program in Wales, UK, Prevention Science, April 2020.
- Clarkson et al: Introducing KiVa a school-based anti-bullying programme to the UK: A preliminary examination of effectiveness and programme cost, School Psychology International, Open Research Exeter, University of Exeter, 2019.
- DCSF: Safe to Learn: Embedding Anti-Bullying Work in Schools, 2007: https://bit.ly/3Cvy3rg
- DfE: Whole school approach: Managing poor behaviour, 2014: https://bit.ly/3yGQQxq
- DfE: Using rewards: Encouraging good behaviour, 2014: https://bit.ly/3s5B64A
- Ditch the Label: The Annual Bullying Survey 2020, November 2020: https://bit.ly/3j0V0es
- Gardner: Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences (second edition), Basic Books, 2011.
- Humanutopia: www.humanutopia.com
- McGregor: Why it works: The theoretical basis to humanutopia’s work, humanutopia, 2017.
- Shaw: School bullying during a pandemic, UCL Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science Special Paper on Covid-19, No.16. June 2020: https://bit.ly/2W52Z16
- Smith: I’ve become increasingly interested in cultural differences, The Psychologist (34), April 2021.
- Smith, Cowie & Blades: Understanding Children’s Development (sixth edition), Wiley, 2015.
- Thaler & Sunstein: Nudge. Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, Yale University Press, 2008.