Darren Lewis on how bullying at school is having a shocking impact on our kids

If schools take bullying so seriously, why are so many kids killing themselves?

If our schools are so safe, why are the helpless parents of Sam Connor, Jessica Scatterson and hundreds more rebuilding their shattered lives having lost their teenagers?

Sam, 14, lay down in front of a train last week after writing a note containing the passcode to his phone and handing it to a friend, along with his mobile and bag.

Jessica, 12, from Warrington, hanged herself. She’d named her alleged bullies in a note.

Abusive messages were also discovered on her iPad.

And last month Shukri Yahya Abdi, a 12-year-old refugee schoolgirl, drowned in a local river.

Her family say she’d been badly bullied for over a year and claim the school failed to deal with it.

A petition calling for an investigation has collected more than 30,000 signatures.

Parents will also be well-versed with the insistence from schools that they “take bullying very seriously”, yada, yada, yada.

The reality, in the wider context, is that it is not enough.

Three in five young people have been bullied in school and nearly a third of 1,000 surveyed have been bullied online, according research by charity the Diana Award.

When teachers are not too overworked to deal with it, schools are so concerned about a negative impact on their OFSTED rating that they play down bullying.

Youngsters soon accept the futility of going to a teacher – and suffer in silence.

From September this year there are plans to introduce a new school inspection framework, for precisely this reason.

The number of suicides is too high, the systems too ineffective.

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