Jubilee Academy, Kelly Vaughan – Vice Principal

Work on bullying needs to happen as children are unsure what actually constitutes as bullying.

“We needed to find a way for the children to report”

We had some parents come into school saying their child was being bullied online but it hadn’t been reported to us. We knew we had to do something different to what was already in place in school. We needed to find a way for the children to report what was happening but in such a way that they felt safe. We use Commando Joe’s and they have links with tootoot, which is how we initially heard of tootoot. Michael Brennan contacted our Principal – Jennie Westley – to explain a little about tootoot and ask if she was interested in a demonstration. We had a demonstration, really liked what we saw and implemented it as quickly as we could.

Every child in school has their own login – at present we have only distributed logins to KS2, with Y2 receiving their logins later in the year. Children have opportunities to access tootoot throughout the school day and they also use it at home. The set up was so easy! Tootoot did most of the hard work and we just had to launch it and give the children their logins and show them how it works. This was also a great opportunity to reiterate to our students the importance of being safe online and keeping passwords secure. To launch to our students we dedicated a small number of assemblies to it and teachers used IT lessons to demonstrate it to the children but these were what we considered to be vital arrangements. The set up was also very quick! The part which took the most time was when a number of children (in their initial excitement) logged on just to say ‘hello’ and there were a number of cases to respond to which weren’t actual cases. This was a natural response to something new being launched in school as we asked our students to do a test case.

“The support for set up and on going is excellent.”

There’s always been someone at the end of a phone or an email who has been willing to help as and when we have had questions. The support for set up and on going customer service is excellent.

From our experience, our children are able to report anything that’s happened as soon as they can – without feeling the pressure of peers or potential bullies seeing them talk to an adult. We can see patterns of behaviour – any particular names that crop up – and address them as necessary. It has also resulted in several safeguarding disclosures, which then enabled us to put in place the best courses of action for those children concerned.

“Tootoot saves us so much time.”

Tootoot saves us so much time. Children are able to share their worries much more quickly which means we can deal with them before they develop into a more serious problem. As a result of this we have recommended tootoot to a number of schools already. It’s a really valuable tool for our children to combat bullying. Bullying – by it’s nature – relies on secrecy and often the complicity of others. Tootoot means anyone can expose bullying behaviour in a way that feels safe. The anonymity aspect of it means people speak up when they might not have otherwise.