Agenda item

Mr Greenfield from Northants County Council explained that his service area looks to receive reports of hate incidents – but not hate crimes – from schools.

They use the definition that a hate incident is any incident perceived to be motivated by hate by the victim or anyone else.

Mr Greenfield said that reports of hate crime should be made directly to the Police.

The County Council used to ask schools for monthly paper updates. The system was not as robust as was wanted. So Jo Wood the anti-bullying co-ordinator and Mr Greenfield rewrote the policy and have undertaken some activities with schools to encourage them to report hate incidents – but not hate crime – electronically and categorising the incidents according to whether they are to do with race, religion/belief, LGBT, disability, gender, transgender or some other type of bullying. NCC’s role was to disaggregate the data and send it to the Police for their use.

A DVD had been made to help schools prepare to meet their public sector equality duties.

Work had been done with Capita to create a new system for use by all the schools as Capita were already providing finance systems for schools.

The new computer system went live in September 2011. There were some problems with it and some schools continued to use the paper system.  More information was sent to schools including asking them to report even nil returns rather than to make no report at all.

Countywide community safety priorities for the year ahead were due to recommend domestic violence, tackling reoffending, drugs and alcohol, crime preventation and hate crime as priorities. At Northampton level there was interest in also adopting domestic abuse and serious acquisitive crime as priorities.

Mr Greenfield and Jo Wood were now working with schools identified as having high incidences of bullying and data was starting to be sent to the county council.

Mr Greenfield explained that the county council is using the “STOP” programme – teaching children and young people that when incidents happen to them several times on purpose that they can report them as bullying.

Locally there was area-based working. If a youth was identified as being a victim then it was possible to tap into multi-agency monthly meetings. There could also be support put into schools to help deal with bullying. It might be possible to fund some diversionary activities.

There is also work done on looking at how to prevent incidents by having ‘healthy schools’ and ‘anti-bullying awareness’ programmes.

School governor training started in 2011 and more was due to happen in 2012.

Anjona Roy suggested that in terms of benchmarking its performance now the county council should look back to when it had a racial incidents officer and that the county council might consider working with Northants Rights and Equality Council (“NREC”). NREC had received reports of children from different schools in the community, including primary school age children bullied by secondary school age children. There was a perception that the Police regard such incidents as low level so that they don’t want to respond. An example was given that a parent who tried to persuade a Police officer to respond was threatened with a harassment order.

There was a wish for an annual report to governors about levels of incidents and reports made within each school.

There was a concern that more needed to be done to help schools who want to make reporting hate crime one of their equality objectives to be published by April 2012.

There was interest in whether NREC or other people or organisations might become OFSTED Consultees.

The following link was identified to be included in these Minutes:

http://www.northamptonshire.gov.uk/en/councilservices/educationandlearning/parents/anti-bullying/pages/professionals.aspx

Some members of the Forum referred to cases parents had asked them to help with. A common issue seemed to be the lack of awareness of any central point to refer concerned parents to for help – and a reluctance merely to provide them with a link to a website.

Morcea Walker referred to the youth-led Stamp out Hate Crime campaign which had been initially looking at raising awareness of what hate crime is and how it can include hate incidents and bullying. She said that there is a lack of awareness among parents. She had noticed that when the youth forum have been explaining what hate crime is, then other young people and parents understand, but it seems to be for the first time – that they have not understood information from the county council or schools before that point. She also raised concerns that the reporting system was expecting too much from staff in schools to be able to categorise hate incidents and types of incident in order to receive and pass on reports and wondered if this might be a barrier to effective reporting.

This view was echoed by another member of the forum who felt that more needed to be done if school teachers were to understand what hate crime is, the culture and diversity of victims. There was a view that more needed to be done to raise awareness within the school community at all levels that everyone has their own perceptions and prejudices which contribute to learned behaviours. There was interest to know how the county council measures the understandings teachers have of pupil behaviour, diversity and hate crime – not just hate incidents.

There was a concern that more needs to be done to raise awareness among youth of the impact of behaviour on other youth.

There was a concern that in some cases people from Polish backgrounds are not identified as victims of racism because they are seen as being white.