Our whole school community came together this week to reinforce the school’s culture of kindness and respect towards one another.

Throughout the week, boys have been spending tutorial time learning about the importance of kindness, as well as looking at what to do in some bullying situations.

Kindness underlies all of the school’s values and is something that the school reinforces every day. However, as this week is National Anti-Bullying Week, we sharpened our focus upon this seemingly simple and perhaps obvious human characteristic. The boys spoke about how choosing kindness does not cost anything but can help someone enormously. Kindness facts and top tips discussed included:

  • Choose kindness, as you never know what someone else is going through
  • Saying something nice can bring a smile to someone’s face
  • Acts of kindness will never come back to hurt you and are never wasted on someone
  • Being mean and hurting others can hurt someone very deeply; think twice about what you say or do
  • Acts of kindness are good for you – they release oxytocin which lowers our blood pressure
  • Being kind can help others feel happy and confident

Next the boys spent time discussing and debating a number of bullying-related scenarios to get them thinking about how they can identify bullying and how to get help. Questions debated included:

  • If someone is being bullied online, should they just shut down their account?
  • When does banter become bullying?
  • What should schools do to tackle homophobia amongst students?
  • Should all forms of bullying be against the law?
  • Is there such a thing as an innocent bystander when seeing someone being bullied?
  • Have the effects of bullying been exaggerated in society?

Boys also talked about what advice they could give someone who was being bullied, looking at a range of different topics which included isolation, name-calling, setting up fake profiles online, physical abuse and suicide.

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