Bullying, prejudice, and racism incident audit – academic year 2023 to 2024

Introduction

This audit outlines the data that the Local Authority (LA) has received from schools and settings reporting incidents of bullying, prejudice, and racism (BPRIs) for the academic year 2023 to 2024.  Schools and settings should be reporting all incidents of bullying, prejudice, and racism to the LA.  This includes prejudice towards gender identity, sexual orientation, sexism/sexual harassment, disability, religion/belief, and perceived characteristics. 

Summary of key findings

• This was the second year of the new online reporting system.  We saw more schools using the system and an increase of 29% of the number incidents reported to the Local authority, with 1390 BPRIs reported. 
• There has been a significant increase to 55% of all assailants having some SEND, an increase from 43% last year.  The most noticeable increase is children who are recorded as SEN or SEMH on school records. 
• The data shows that the anticipated increase in racism and religion/belief prejudice following the Israel-Hamas conflict didn’t occur, with no outliers.  
• Across all ages racism incidents has increased by 9%.  In Primary schools racism reports have increased by 50%, with a noticeable increase in year 5.  The year 7 and 8 BPRI trends noted last year, remained the same through the year, with these two year groups amounting to the most BPRIs.   
• This year saw a 6% increase in the number of children and staff targeted by racism who are Black, Black British, Black Caribbean or Black African. 
• There has been nearly a 50% decrease in the number of Hate crimes recorded this academic year.  Compared to last year the year 7s accounted for the majority of hate crime, extremism and hate incidents, with year 8s close behind.  A significant increase in these type of incidents by year 5 children has also been noted. 
• Bullying through threats is becoming an increasingly prevalent form of bullying, as well as physical bullying.  Cyber bullying is down by half, from 20% to 10%.  Bullying is also occurring more across Devon than the previous year, from reviewing the Hot spot map – this could be due to more schools reporting bullying effectively. 
• Verbal offenses of sexism/sexual harassment has increased to 66%, compared to 28% the previous year.  There has also been a noticeable increase in sexism/sexual harassment threats. 
• There has been an increase of 19% of sexism/sexual harassment towards females compared to the previous year. 
• Sexual Orientation prejudice has the most significant links to other BPRI foci, compared to racism and other prejudices.  This was the same for the previous year. 
• This year has seen an increase of 10% of gender identity prejudice that has occurred through written or visual means.