As part of supporting anti-bullying week, we have focused on the phrases: #changestartswithus and #choosekindness.

We shared and discussed a range of resources and situations and how, as a school, we must all #choose kindness and how #changestartswithus can make a difference to our school.

#ChooseKindness top tips

Choosing kindness doesn't cost anything but can help someone enormously. We all have choices to make, do you #choosekindness?

• 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 is 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

Definitions

In order to help us identify and manage incidents of bullying, we have defined and shared the following terms with our community.

Rude is “saying or doing something that upsets someone else.”

In children this takes the form of social errors like “burping in someone's face, jumping ahead in line, bragging about achieving the highest score or even throwing a crushed up pile of leaves in someone's face.” The critical factor? “Incidents of rudeness are usually spontaneous, unplanned inconsideration, based on thoughtlessness or poor manners but not meant to actually hurt someone.”

Being mean involves “purposefully saying or doing something to hurt someone once (or maybe twice).”

Unlike unthinking rudeness, “mean behavior very much aims to hurt or depreciate someone….Very often, mean behavior in kids is motivated by angry feelings and/or the misguided goal of propping themselves up in comparison to the person they are putting down.”

Bullying is “intentionally aggressive behavior, repeated over time, that involves an imbalance of power….

Children who bully say or do something intentionally hurtful to others and they keep doing it, with no sense of regret or remorse -- even when targets of bullying show or express their hurt or tell the aggressors to stop. The key aspect is the ongoing nature of the behavior, which leaves the victims feeling powerless and fearful.