IT is difficult at first glance to effectively analyse the latest statistics issued today by the council on bullying and harassment in the city's schools.
While a relatively moderate rise in the numbers of racist incidents should give some cause for concern there is some satisfaction to be gained in the fact that the numbers of children reported for bullying continues to fall sharply.
But what shou
ld perhaps be more worrying is – even by the council's own admission – is that the figures appear to be far from an accurate picture of the true extent of what goes on in school corridors and playgrounds as it appears most schools have fallen out of the habit of recording or reporting such incidents.
The lack of co-operation from some schools is disappointing. Edinburgh has always attempted to take a robust attitude towards bullying. Eight years ago it launched a strategy to tackle it by encouraging both pupils and teachers to report and log incidents. It is still one of only nine local authorities in the country which continues to produce annual figures on reported incidents.
From today's evidence it would appear that its attempts to gather effective data are being undermined by staff in the majority of city schools who claim only a few incidents have taken place in the last year.
This is hard to accept – certainly so for the council, which believes that today's reported figures are still only the tip of the iceberg and that many incidents are still going unreported.
They are backed in that assumption by Edinburgh and Lothians Racial Equality Council, which believes that only one in four incidents of racial abuse are being reported. And it does seem strange that in the wider world Lothian and Borders Police puts the steep rise in the number of racial crimes that they have recorded down to a greater willingness among victims to lodge complaints.
Doubtless one of the difficulties facing teaching staff is determining what constitutes bullying or just teasing which has gone too far. For example, it is difficult to understand why 14 incidents of homophobic attacks in primary schools were logged last year against pupils of an age where they are unlikely to be fully aware of their own sexuality. How many of these could have been regarded as pre-adolescent repetition of words and phrases picked up by children and not insults?
There has to be consistency in reporting if the council is to ascertain the extent of the problems and develop effective strategies to combat bullying and all types of harassment. But clear guidelines have to be issued so that political correctness does not run amok and that genuine incidents do not become confused with everyday playground banter with which generations of children have grown up.
