Berwick Academy serves the town and rural area of Berwick-upon-Tweed in North Northumberland. It is a small, friendly school with approximately 500 pupils aged 13-18, including around 99 pupils in the sixth form.

Why did you decide to introduce tootoot to Berwick Academy?

We’re proud to have been one of the first schools to use tootoot, the founders of the app were once pupils here and now their app has become a valuable resource at Berwick Academy ever since we launched it in 2015.

Pupils like that the app is anonymous, giving them a way to voice their concerns without worrying about being identified themselves by bullies.

“With tootoot pupils are much more willing to speak up about any concerns they have allowing us to deal with cases quickly and effectively.”

Do you have any cases that really stand out to you?

The most recent case we received through the app involved bullying outside of school, one of our vulnerable pupils was being physically harassed on a public bus, another pupil - having seen the incident take place - used tootoot to report it.

The message was received by school staff instantly and this significantly contributed to resolving the case. We have chosen to respect the pupil’s anonymity in this instance, the pupil wasn’t in immediate danger, and we know this anonymity gave the witness the confidence to report the bullying in the first place.

We were able to resolve the case effectively and due to the circumstances pass the message on to police to assist in their investigation. With tootoot pupils are much more willing to speak up about any concerns they have allowing us to deal with cases quickly and effectively. 

How has tootoot supported your wide anti-bullying work?

As well as giving pupils the confidence to speak out, tootoot is a valuable tool for monitoring and analysing cases of bullying. The app has a dashboard and reports feature which allows us to build a bigger picture of all cases at our school, this lets us identify trends and evaluate our safeguarding practices. We recently used tootoot’s reporting feature during an Ofsted visit to provide an overview of bullying cases and how they were resolved. 

“Tootoot is unique and unlike anything else available to schools.”

Tootoot is unique and unlike anything else available to schools. We’ve used incident recording tools in the past, but no other product has the ability for pupils to report concerns themselves in confidence or gives detailed analyses and reports of all our cases.