Education Ministry to consult with stakeholders in plan to address bullying in schools

Education Ministry to consult with stakeholders in plan to address bullying in schools

Education Minister, Priya Manickchand has announced that her Ministry will be holding public consultations to formulate a policy to address the question of bullying in schools. In the meantime though, she said guidance and counseling officers will be placed in schools to address the problem.

Although there has been no notable increase in bullying, the Education Minister said steps will still be taken in school to address the issue, with some schools benefiting from two and three officers.

She acknowledged that bullying has been a problem in the classroom and in schools in general and noted with the advent of social media, there other avenues for children to be bullied, hence she said a policy is needed to fully address the problem.

“Bullying is not only in the classroom, we have had complaints of the various forms of bullying and abuse of children, but we haven’t seen an increase in it, when you put together large numbers. In fact, we are going to launch very soon a programme Olato Sam had begun to work on before he died, we are continuing it with the assistance of Ann Greene, former head of the Child Care and Protection Agency,” the Education Minister said.

The Minister said it was found that one of the issues which led to bullying in schools was lack of supervision in some of the schools. 

However, she noted that with intervention by the Ministry, some of the schools which were having frequent reports of bullying have gone relatively quiet, as there have been no recent reported cases.

“We are trying to put together a full strategy that will see parents signing contracts and some other things that we want to test and consult on before we put out fully because the one thing we have not done is take it out for consultations and when you have so many stakeholders, we have to consult on some of these policies because a successful implementation would involve all of us, so we can’t just hand out a policy without first checking with those stakeholders,” the Education Minister noted.

The issue of bullying had forced The Ministry of Education on a number of occasions to collaborate with the Guyana Police Force to conduct random searches at schools for potential weapons. In some instances screwdrivers, knives, scissors and toy guns were found during some of these random searches.

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