Chapter 9
Who trains the teachers?
By the early 2000s, teachers were being asked to do a great deal more about bullying.
Schools had anti-bullying responsibilities. Government guidance was expanding. New forms of bullying were being recognised. Teachers might need to respond to physical aggression, exclusion, discriminatory bullying, online behaviour, safeguarding concerns, distressed parents and sometimes behaviour that could involve the law.
But there was an obvious question:
Who was training the teachers to do all of this?
Knowing how to manage a classroom is not necessarily the same as knowing how to recognise bullying, talk to somebody experiencing it, work with somebody carrying it out, understand peer group dynamics, distinguish bullying from conflict, respond to discriminatory behaviour or decide whether an intervention has actually worked.
As expectations placed on schools increased, concern grew that specialist preparation was not keeping pace.
Young people raise the question
In 2005 the issue was raised not simply by academics or professional organisations, but by young people themselves.
At the I Power I national anti-bullying conference for young people, produced by Actionwork, delegates voted unanimously to call for intensive anti-bullying training for new teachers as part of teacher training, together with short intensive programmes for existing teachers.
John Penrose MP took that proposal into Parliament as Early Day Motion 1009, Anti-Bullying Initiatives for Young People, on 14 November 2005. The motion specifically recognised the work of young people at the conference and called for anti-bullying training for both new and serving teachers. It eventually attracted 57 signatures from MPs across parties.
There is something significant about where that proposal came from.
Young people who were being asked what might improve anti-bullying work did not simply ask for another poster, campaign or awareness week.
They asked for better prepared adults.
The government response
The government could reasonably point to training that was already taking place.
In February 2006, Schools Minister Jacqui Smith told Parliament that training had been provided through the regional Make the Difference conferences, Anti-Bullying Alliance training events, work with individual schools, National Strategies behaviour materials and specialist programmes for staff with leadership responsibilities for behaviour and attendance. However, the Department could not identify a separate national figure for anti-bullying teacher training because that expenditure was not separately disaggregated.
This revealed an important difference between two positions.
The government could say that teachers had access to information, resources and training connected with bullying.
Campaigners were asking something more specific:
Would every new teacher actually be trained to deal with bullying?
Those are not quite the same question.
The campaign continues
The issue returned the following year.
Actionwork and I Power I continued campaigning, and EDM 382, Anti-Bullying Training, was tabled by John Penrose on 4 December 2006. It attracted 72 parliamentary signatures. Together, the two motions gained 129 signatures across the two parliamentary sessions.
The surviving evaluation of the 2006 I Power I conference records that 98 per cent of those attending believed anti-bullying training should be a core part of teacher training. It also records continued campaigning by Actionwork and I Power I and correspondence with government on the issue.
The same record says that Prime Minister Tony Blair praised the campaigners' work and commitment but did not agree to make dedicated anti-bullying training a core component because of the limited training time available to new teachers.
The argument therefore remained unresolved.
Parliament investigates
In 2007 the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee examined bullying in schools in considerably greater depth.
Teacher training became one of the issues that concerned the Committee most.
The Department for Education and Skills argued that behaviour management featured prominently in initial teacher training. But Professor Peter K. Smith told the inquiry that available research suggested many teachers and trainee teachers lacked a good knowledge base about bullying and would welcome more training. He described in service provision as dependent largely on what individual schools or local authorities happened to provide.
The Committee made an important distinction:
General behaviour management training is not necessarily anti-bullying training.
Evidence given to the inquiry was striking. When asked how much anti-bullying work was included in initial teacher training, Professor Smith replied that, essentially, there was none. Steve Sinnott, then General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, supported that view, while Michele Elliott of Kidscape described visiting one university where trainee teachers received half a day devoted to bullying.
The Committee concluded that there was insufficient focus on bullying in teacher training and recommended that all initial teacher training courses contain a clear focus on preventing and addressing bullying. It also criticised the uneven nature of continuing professional development, noting that teachers working in schools already committed to anti-bullying work were more likely to receive training than those working where it was given less priority.
That finding exposed a difficult contradiction.
The teachers who might most need additional support could be working in the schools least likely to provide it.
Training for what?
There was another problem.
Even where training existed, what exactly did a teacher need to learn?
The 2007 Committee noted concerns that training did not always deal sufficiently with bullying connected with race and sex, with some issues apparently assumed to be covered somewhere else. The Committee recommended that training also address bullying related to special educational needs, race, gender and sexuality.
As our history has already shown, the understanding of bullying itself had been changing. A teacher prepared only to recognise a bigger child threatening a smaller one in a playground could easily miss relational exclusion, discriminatory bullying, peer group behaviour or harm taking place through a phone.
Training therefore had to change as bullying changed.
And it needed to help teachers do more than identify a problem.
Teachers also needed possible ways of responding.
Nearly twenty years later
The argument did not end in 2007.
Teacher education in England changed repeatedly during the following years, with new professional standards, behaviour frameworks, safeguarding requirements and early career arrangements.
From September 2025, England introduced the combined Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework, which establishes a minimum entitlement to training for trainee and early career teachers. Under its section on managing behaviour, trainees are now expected to learn how to develop a positive, predictable and safe environment and specifically to respond quickly to behaviour or bullying that threatens physical or emotional safety.
That is a significant historical development.
It is not identical to the dedicated intensive anti-bullying training called for by the young people at the I Power I conference twenty years earlier.
But bullying is now explicitly present within the national minimum framework for preparing new teachers in England.
Who trains the teachers?
Perhaps the question has never simply been whether teachers care about bullying.
Most teachers enter education to help young people, not to ignore harm.
The harder question is whether we equip them for what we expect them to do.
We ask teachers to notice bullying that may be almost invisible, listen carefully, understand policies and safeguarding responsibilities, work with families, respond to prejudice, deal with online behaviour, support someone experiencing bullying, challenge someone carrying it out and judge whether what they have done has actually made things better.
That requires more than good intentions.
The history of teacher training also raises another question.
During the 2000s, government increasingly worked with charities, alliances, researchers and specialist organisations to provide anti-bullying expertise, resources and training to schools. Some received substantial public funding. Others developed their work independently.
As anti-bullying became a recognised professional field, questions about who provided the expertise, who received the funding and who influenced national priorities became increasingly important.