Chapter 10
Growth, funding and professionalisation
By the beginning of the twenty first century, anti-bullying work was changing in another way.
It was becoming a professional field.
Researchers studied bullying. Charities employed specialist staff. Organisations produced programmes and resources. Trainers worked with schools. Theatre companies and facilitators delivered workshops. Helplines provided support. Conferences, awards and national campaigns appeared. Government departments increasingly worked with outside organisations to turn policy into activity.
Much of this growth was valuable. Schools did not necessarily have the time or specialist expertise to develop everything themselves, and organisations working across many schools could gather experience, conduct research, develop resources and bring new ideas into education.
But professionalisation introduced another set of questions:
Who provides anti-bullying work? Who pays for it? Who decides what gets funded? And who gets to influence the direction of the field?
Government investment grows
Government spending gives us some indication of how rapidly the field developed.
Between 2004/05 and 2009/10, the Department for Education and its predecessors awarded £10.48 million in grants and contracts for anti-bullying work, an average of about £1.75 million a year. Recipients included the Anti-Bullying Alliance, Parentline Plus, Diana Awards, BeatBullying, Stonewall, ChildLine, Kidscape, Childnet International and others. A further £1.98 million was budgeted in 2010/11.
The pattern continued. From 2013, government provided more than £4 million over two years to BeatBullying, the Diana Award, Kidscape and a National Children’s Bureau consortium. Between 2016 and 2020 another £2.8 million went to four anti-bullying organisations, alongside separate government funding to tackle homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying.
In 2020 a further £750,000 was awarded to the Diana Award, Anti-Bullying Alliance and Anne Frank Trust. Between August 2021 and March 2024, more than £3 million went to five organisations: the Anti-Bullying Alliance, Diversity Role Models, EqualiTeach, the Anne Frank Trust and the Diana Award.
By October 2024 those particular grants had ended. The Department for Education said it was reviewing their impact and considering what future programmes might look like.
The individual programmes and recipients changed over time, but one feature remained striking.
A comparatively small group of organisations appeared repeatedly within nationally funded anti-bullying work.
From network to gatekeeper?
There were good practical reasons for government to work with established organisations. National bodies could administer substantial grants, employ staff, work across regions, provide reports and evaluations and respond quickly when government wanted expertise.
The Anti-Bullying Alliance, established in 2002, became particularly influential as a national network bringing organisations together and providing government with an identifiable point of contact for the anti-bullying sector.
But a system like this can gradually concentrate influence.
An organisation receives public funding partly because it already has national experience and credibility. That funding enables it to employ more people, produce more research, develop more programmes and become more visible. Increased visibility makes it more likely to be invited into consultations, partnerships and subsequent funding opportunities.
Success can become self-reinforcing.
Over time, the major national organisations can therefore become more than providers. They can become gateways into the national anti-bullying conversation and, intentionally or otherwise, gatekeepers within it.
This does not require anybody to deliberately exclude others. It can happen because funding, government access, expertise, national campaigns and professional networks increasingly circulate within a relatively tight circle.
That matters for smaller charities, independent organisations, local projects and individual practitioners. They may be doing innovative or effective work but lack the infrastructure, contacts or previous government contracts that make entry into the national system easier.
It also raises uncomfortable questions. Who gets invited to advise government? Who decides what constitutes good practice? Which areas attract funding? Which organisations become visible to schools? And who has the resources to evaluate their own work strongly enough to win the next contract?
National coordination can open doors.
It can also determine who gets through them.
From voluntary work to an industry
Schools themselves were also spending money.
They could purchase anti-bullying programmes, workshops, performances, training, consultancy and resources from charities, voluntary organisations and private providers.
Choice increased, but so did a market.
In 2007 the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee heard concerns that schools were paying substantial sums to charities and companies for anti-bullying interventions without sufficient independent evidence about which approaches worked or represented good value for money.
That was an important moment.
Anti-bullying work was no longer only a social cause. It had also become employment, professional expertise, contracts, products, programmes and organisational income.
None of those things is inherently problematic. Skilled people need paying. Research costs money. Training, staffing, technology and national support systems require funding.
But once an anti-bullying industry exists, another question becomes unavoidable:
How do we make sure that sustaining anti-bullying organisations never becomes more important than reducing bullying?
When growth becomes fragile
The history of BeatBullying provides one of the most striking examples of what professionalisation could produce.
BeatBullying became a major national organisation and an early innovator in online peer support. In 2012 the Cabinet Office awarded it £1.3 million to expand its online mentoring model, with ambitions to recruit thousands of volunteers and provide support around bullying alongside racism, violence and other difficulties experienced by young people. In 2013, further government investment supported MindFull, developed by the BeatBullying team to provide online mental health support.
Its activities were therefore moving beyond a conventional anti-bullying charity. Technology, peer mentoring, mental health and wider youth support increasingly sat alongside its original focus.
Expansion can increase reach and innovation.
It can also increase complexity, staffing requirements and dependence on continuing income.
By 2014 BeatBullying was in serious financial difficulty.
Current and former staff wrote to trustees raising grievances and alleging breaches of employment contracts, inadequate financial controls and unpaid pension contributions. Some staff had not received their full salaries for several months. These were serious allegations made during an extremely difficult period for the organisation.
BeatBullying subsequently entered voluntary liquidation in November 2014.
However, the later Charity Commission investigation provides an essential counterweight to the staff grievances. The Commission found that BeatBullying had been heavily dependent on grant income, had no reserves and had failed to receive two anticipated grants worth a combined £1,444,608. It concluded that the loss of this expected income caused severe cash flow problems. Crucially, the Commission found no evidence that the charity's failure resulted from financial misconduct, mismanagement or misapplication of funds, and concluded that the trustees had fulfilled their duties.
That makes BeatBullying more interesting historically, not less.
It would be too simple to say that an organisation expanded and was therefore badly managed. The regulator did not reach that conclusion.
But its history does expose the vulnerability of an ambitious organisation dependent upon continued grant income.
When does growth increase impact, and when does growth begin to make an organisation fragile?
What happens when a major organisation disappears?
BeatBullying's collapse also revealed something about the wider system.
When a small local project closes, the consequences can be severe for the people who use it.
When a large national organisation closes, the effects can spread much further. Staff lose employment, volunteers lose their infrastructure, partnerships stop, projects disappear and young people using services may suddenly have to look elsewhere.
This is another consequence of concentration.
The greater the amount of expertise, funding and provision concentrated within a small number of organisations, the greater the potential disruption if one of those organisations fails.
Professionalisation can therefore create both capacity and dependency.
The field changes direction
The next decade shows that anti-bullying work did not simply remain where it had been in 2005.
Its boundaries became increasingly blurred.
Mental health, online abuse, identity, prejudice, relationships, digital literacy and wellbeing became much more closely connected with work that had once been described primarily as anti-bullying.
Ditch the Label provides an interesting example.
It began as an anti-bullying organisation before deliberately broadening its youth focus. Its charitable objects came to cover five connected areas: bullying prevention, mental health and wellbeing, digital literacy, healthy relationships and identity. Its support and research similarly span bullying, online abuse, anxiety, self-esteem, identity and wider experiences affecting young people.
Its large youth surveys also showed another development in the sector. Organisations could now gather data directly from thousands of young people and use it to examine rapidly changing experiences online.
By 2025 Ditch the Label's annual income was approximately £602,000. Its work included digital support, counselling, research, educational programmes and support around mental health, identity, bullying and relationships.
This is not simply a story of organisations becoming larger.
It is a story of the category itself becoming larger.
By the 2020s, calling some organisations anti-bullying organisations no longer fully described what they actually did.
Progress or drift?
There are at least two ways of looking at that development.
One is that the sector matured.
Bullying does not exist in isolation from mental health, discrimination, identity, relationships or digital life. Working across those areas may reflect a much more realistic understanding of young people's experiences.
The other possibility is that organisations can gradually move so far beyond their original purpose that the central issue becomes diluted.
Those possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
Broadening an organisation's work may make it more useful to young people while simultaneously making it harder to say exactly where anti-bullying work begins and ends.
This also complicates funding. A programme may address bullying, mental health, hate, online safety and relationships simultaneously. Counting how much government or charitable money is being spent specifically on bullying therefore becomes progressively harder.
Did the system itself change?
By 2025 the field looked very different from twenty years earlier.
Digital support had become normal. Peer support could happen online. Large youth surveys could collect thousands of responses quickly. Schools had access to specialist work around SEND, prejudice and identity based bullying. Relationships education addressed behaviour both online and offline. National organisations worked with technology companies, government departments and increasingly sophisticated digital platforms.
Yet several older problems remained remarkably familiar.
England still had no statutory national definition of bullying. Schools still differed considerably in how they recorded and responded to it. In 2024 the Department for Education confirmed that there was still no legal requirement for schools in England to record and report bullying incidents nationally.
That makes one of the most basic historical questions surprisingly difficult to answer.
After decades of national campaigns, government funding, professional organisations, research projects, specialist programmes and Anti-Bullying Weeks:
How much bullying is actually happening?
And:
Is there less of it than there used to be?
Without consistent measurement over long periods, the answer is much harder to establish than we might expect.
Who sets the agenda?
Funding does more than enable work.
It can affect what work gets done.
When government prioritises cyberbullying, programmes develop around cyberbullying. When funding targets SEND, prejudice or protected characteristics, organisations build projects around those priorities. That responsiveness can be valuable because public funding can direct attention towards groups whose experiences have previously been overlooked.
But direction can also travel the other way. Established organisations conduct research, advise government, campaign around particular issues and help shape the language through which problems are understood.
Government, funders and national organisations therefore influence one another.
The concern is not that this automatically produces bad decisions.
It is that a comparatively small professional circle can acquire considerable power over funding, language, priorities and visibility.
There is then one more question to ask:
Where are the young people?
If professionals decide the research questions, government decides the funding priorities, organisations design the programmes and schools purchase the interventions, young people can once again become recipients of anti-bullying work rather than people with influence over it.
We have travelled back to one of the central questions of this site:
Do we make anti-bullying work for young people, or with them?
More activity does not necessarily mean less bullying
By 2025 Britain had more than two decades of Anti-Bullying Week, specialist charities, national alliances, research, legislation, online services, school programmes, professional training, government guidance and millions of pounds of public investment behind it.
That is a remarkable transformation from the period when bullying could be dismissed as an unpleasant but character building part of childhood.
But the amount of anti-bullying activity is not itself a measure of the amount of bullying.
We can count funding, programmes, organisations, workshops, performances, evaluations, research reports, campaigns and resources.
And after all that money, all that research, all those programmes, shows, workshops, conferences and evaluations, there is still something remarkably fundamental that we have not resolved:
We still cannot agree on exactly what bullying is.
Different researchers define it differently. Different countries define it differently. Different organisations emphasise different characteristics. Even within the UK, the legal and policy definitions are not the same.
That does not mean the work has failed.
But it should make us cautious about claiming that the problem has been solved simply because the response to it has become larger and more professional.
Perhaps professionalisation therefore leaves us with two questions rather than one:
Did the anti-bullying sector become more sophisticated?
Almost certainly.
Did bullying become less common because of it?
That is much harder to answer.
By the end of 2025, anti-bullying work had become a recognised professional field, a network, a source of expertise and, in some respects, an industry.
The history is not finished.