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Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 16 September 2025

Debate

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Contribution

My Lords, I will raise some reservations that I have about Amendments 501 and 502E, on bullying in schools, and Amendment 464, on the reporting of racism or faith-based bullying. Bullying is a label that has been subject to the phenomena of concept creep. Bullying has now expanded enormously. It is an elastic term and so a wide range of behaviours can be described as bullying. I fear that it is becoming a vehicle to encourage pupils to lack resilience —a point was just raised about how we deal with the issue of resilience. I have written about this extensively. For now, I note that, via anti-bullying initiatives in schools already, pupils are taught that words hurt and damage, that words can become interchangeable with violence, and that name-calling is on a par with physical intimidation. Inevitably, that can lead the young to believe that speech is violence. I think all of us can acknowledge that that is a problem at the moment, with people who say that speech is violence then feeling able to use violence to deal with speech they dislike—a very current issue.

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