Comberton Village College is a UNICEF Rights Respecting School and has used this framework to respond to and tackle child-on-child abuse and harassment. Jennie Girling and Marielle Burgess describe the progress they have made


As duty bearers for children’s rights, we have a responsibility to create a safe learning environment where child-on-child abuse is not acceptable. This is how we are achieving it with children’s rights at the top of our mind.

As the Everyone’s Invited scandal and the subsequent Ofsted review (2021) revealed, child-on-child abuse and the culture of sexualised behaviour and misogyny is very much present in schools across the UK.

Soon after the scandal, we realised that, despite our best efforts and being a UNICEF UK Gold Rights Respecting School, our school was not an exception.

Being a Rights Respecting School gives us a useful framework and language to have difficult conversations with pupils and staff and link them to children’s rights.

As a Rights Respecting School, we know that children have the right to be educated in a safe environment where they feel treated equally and with dignity. On top of that, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child directly protects them from abuse and sexual exploitation. We have a duty to ensure their rights are being met at all times.

To begin our work to tackle child-on-child abuse in our school, we conducted a survey among staff, pupils, parents, and carers to identify what this problem looked like at Comberton Village College. We knew we had to get this right.

We needed to hear from the young people who are on the receiving end of this, and to create a safe space for them to speak freely about what they experience at our school.

Out of 1,500 pupils, more than half responded and a small number of pupils said they had experienced child-on-child abuse while at school. We knew that was just the tip of the iceberg as not everyone at that stage would feel comfortable sharing.

Several brave pupils also spoke in focus groups about their experience and contributed with anonymised real-life scenarios which were later used in staff training.

We also conducted a staff survey which clearly showed that we did not all have the confidence to call-out behaviour like this, feeling humiliated ourselves when hearing some of the language used by students or being worried about getting things wrong.

This work gave us a good base to know what the situation looked like at Comberton Village College. We then delivered staff training based on information that the young people had provided.

As the pupils’ survey revealed that most incidents were happening in corridors, all our staff who come into contact with pupils, including teaching assistants, catering team and the wider site team, completed training on safer corridors.

Within this we did some scenario work where we asked colleagues to identify what was bullying, sexual harassment or “just banter” to get us to start talking, listening and thinking. Going through these very real scenarios helped everyone realise that when it comes to child-on-child abuse, nothing is ever “just banter”.

Empowered by their knowledge of rights, students have been passionately involved in this work, helping to analyse the results of the survey, and setting up a pupil-led steering group to determine how to talk to students and staff about child-on-child abuse.

In addition to supporting with staff training, the pupil-led group also worked to educate their peers and they are currently helping with designing our own school posters on child-on-child abuse.

Since then, we have had assemblies on the topic while linking to children’s rights, we have developed a child-on-child abuse policy and, since July, we have been logging child-on-child abuse offences, just like we would for any other type of poor behaviour, to help us continue to monitor the situation.

Pupils have started to report child-on-child abuse and we have seen more than 100 reports of either sexualised language, behaviour and unwanted touching logged on the school system.

But we don't just leave it there. The most important part is the follow up work, educating our young people to understand why such behaviour is not acceptable. We have trained our staff to be able to help pupils understand the effect of their actions, what they could have done differently, and importantly, what is triggering their behaviour.

We are conducting further pupil surveys to monitor where we are, and progress made. We expect to see the number of reports increase because we are raising awareness and normalising these conversations where previously students may not have shared for fear of not being taken seriously enough. We know we have a long journey ahead of us.

We would recommend any school make similar efforts to call-out any behaviour and at the same time educate young people on why they are being called out. But most importantly, listen and take young people seriously.

It is about creating a safe environment in which children feel safe to report in a way that they are comfortable with, and staff feel confident to respond appropriately.

  • Jennie Girling is safeguarding and support manager and Marielle Burgess is the Rights Respecting Schools lead at Comberton Village College in Cambridge.


UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools

  • UNICEF works with schools in the UK to create safe and inspiring places to learn, where children are respected, their talents are nurtured, and they are able to thrive. Around 1.6 million children in the UK go to a Rights Respecting School and nearly 5,000 schools up and down the country are working towards the award. For details, visit www.unicef.org.uk/rights-respecting-schools

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