teachers share how they try to combat bullying at school

Alexandra remembers this student very well, arriving from another college in her third year class, at the start of the 2022 school year in the North. Her management warned her: a victim of school harassment, she had had to change establishment. “The insults, the shoving and the bullying started again very quickly with other students. We had to react immediately”remembers the teacher, who then informs the principal and the principal education advisor.

Individual interviews with the students concerned were immediately carried out and a confrontation was organized between the young girls. “They acknowledged that they didn’t like each other and that they would ignore each other for the rest of the year”says the professor. “There, It was almost perfect.”recalls Alexandra, who, in twenty years of career, has had to deal with numerous cases of school harassment. “That year, the conditions were right for it to go well: the class was calm, I was able to devote time to this student and her mother.” And to conclude: “Unfortunately, this is not always the case.”

Alexandra believes that if this situation was able to be resolved, it is thanks to her twenty years of experience and her personal readings. “More … than the two days of training” which she followed, she judges, as part of the pHARe program, the plan to combat school bullying put in place by the Ministry of National Education. Generalized to all schools and colleges at the start of the 2022 school year, it concerned, in April 2023, “86% of colleges and 60% of schools”, assures the ministry in a press release. But since the start of the school year, several tragic cases of school bullying have highlighted the sometimes problematic management of this scourge by National Education. Urged to act, the government must present, Wednesday September 28, an interministerial plan against school bullying.

“No means to act correctly”

The unions, too, deplore “the lack of training” offered to staff. “We train them in discipline, in didactics, but little in adolescent psychology”points out Laurence Hopp, principal education advisor and national delegate of SE-Unsa. “We need to be able to say to students: ‘Yes, the adults are there for you, to listen to you,’ but for that, we need enough trained people in each establishment”adds the general secretary of Snes-FSU, Sophie Vénétitay, on franceinfo.

“On the ground, I see how much teachers want to do things well, but we sometimes feel mistreated, because we are not given the ways to act correctly”, deplores Alexandra. Patrice, who has taught history and geography for 36 years in a high school private of Bouches-du-Rhône, remembers a bitter failure. “One year, when I was still a young teacher, I wanted to talk about the harassment that a student was experiencing with the whole class. Unfortunately, the others made fun of him even more.”

“I just didn’t know how to do it. Even though now I know how to react, I’ll be willing to sign up for training on this topic twice rather than once.”

Patrice, history and geography teacher

at franceinfo

In addition to the lack of training, “in classes that are overcrowded, it is difficult to spot the student who withdraws into himself, who is not doing well”points out Sophie Vénétitay. “I think I miss 98% of problematic situations”regrets Alexandra. “And then, we have lessons to teach, we cannot be available all the time and stay to listen to a student for a quarter of an hour at the end of each lesson”continues Patrice. “It takes a long, long time.”, he insists. As a head teacher, he says he takes his evenings, his Wednesday afternoons and “sometimes even on Sunday”. “When I have poor parents on the phone, I can’t wait until Monday to resolve these kinds of problems”he emphasizes.

“Neither child psychiatrist nor specialized educator”

Sometimes, even with adequate training and a mobilized team, situations remain insoluble. Aurélie, a teacher in a college in Haut-Rhin, experienced it. In his establishment, the pHARe program has been in place for two years: “All college staff have received training”she greets, noting “a clear difference in the management of harassment cases”. “Before, when we noticed a case or the student reported it to us, we went to find the harasser to punish him. But the problem is that the reprisals were systematic, often outside the lessons and the establishment. “

Despite the involvement of all staff and regular meetings on the subject, certain situations go beyond their skills: cyberharassment in particular. “In these cases, we urge the parents to file a complaint and we take legal action”, explains Aurélie. The methods proposed by the pHARe program, based on empathy and listening, also sometimes experience their limits. “Last year, we had to manage a very complicated situation, with a student who changed targets five times. We felt like we had no control over her. We ended up permanently excluding her from the establishment”, reports the French teacher.

“To have reached the point of taking heavy sanctions is a bit of an admission of failure.”

Aurélie, French teacher

at franceinfo

In his college “calm” from Allier, Juliette remembers feeling helpless in 2019. “I was faced with a student who was clearly harassed, but we were never able to provide proof of what was happening”she remembers. “Finally, by listening to the victim, we helped her, even without sanctioning the people we suspected”says the teacher. “This is also the limit of our skills and our role as teachers: we are neither a child psychiatrist nor a specialized educatorobserves Aurélie. Even if, sometimes, we wonder if we act as a teacher or as a psychologist.”