A Content Analysis of School Anti-Bullying Policies in England: Signs of Progress

Schools in England are required to have an anti-bullying policy. A revised 42-item scoring scheme was used to report a content analysis of 200 anti-bullying policies. On average, school policies had 61% of items. Chi-square comparisons found an increase in policy coverage from 2008 to 2022, notably for mentioning cyber bullying and many types of bias-based bullying; but comparisons are limited by different sampling procedures. Despite good coverage in some areas, fewer than 25% of policies mentioned responsibilities of other school staff, suggested how to help the pupil(s) doing the bullying to change their behaviour, gave advice to parents about bullying, or discussed specific powers to deal with cyberbullying and out-of school bullying. For 131 schools, correlations of self-report scores on bullying victimisation and perpetration with the overall policy score were negative but very small. Ways to improve school policy coverage, and the impact they may have, are discussed.