England: the Sheffield project

Impetus for the intervention, early stages of planning, and funding During 1989–90 school bullying started to become a topic of media attention and focused public concern in the UK. News was filtering through of the success of the Bergen evaluation in Norway. Several books on bullying appeared. The human rights issues involved in school bullying began to get a sympathetic hearing. The Gulbenkian Foundation (UK) started a 10-year period of making the topic of school bullying a priority area for funding and supported many important initiatives. One project supported by Gulbenkian funds was the development of a ‘survey service’ for schools, at the University of Sheffield (Ahmad, Whitney, and Smith, 1991). This was based on a form of the Olweus questionnaire, modified for use in English schools. We piloted this questionnaire in several schools (Boulton and Underwood, 1992; Yates and Smith, 1989) and then carried out a survey of 24 schools in the Sheffield area, to give the first figures, based on a large-scale survey, of the extent of school bullying in English schools (Whitney and Smith, 1993). At this time the Department for Education (DFE, as it then was: now, DfES or Department for Education and Skills) was not taking specific action on bullying. It had not been regarded as a major issue. The 1989 Elton Report on Discipline had raised it as one issue for schools to be concerned with, but the DFE had not acted specifically on this section of the report.