Management Information Sheet

Norfolk County Council has historically collected data in respect of prejudice related incidents and this information has been valuable in informing policy and practice within the LA and appropriate support to schools and educational settings.

For the academic year 2017/18 we moved to an annual reporting model with a single summary return completed in respect of any incident reported in the academic year. This means that individual reports were not be submitted during the year.

The link for the 2018/19 annual report is now live and can be found here. The closing date for returns will be Friday 20 September although we would welcome earlier submissions. If you have had no incidents, you will only need to answer the first question on the form before submitting the return.

Please include all incidents relating to protected characteristics as detailed in the Equality Act 2010.

The protected characteristics are:

• Race (ethnicity)
• Sex (gender)
• Disability
• Religion or belief
• Sexual orientation
• Gender reassignment
• Pregnancy and maternity
• Marriage*
• Age*

* These characteristics refer to staff but not pupils.

Although the Local Authority will be collecting this information annually, it is important that you continue to keep a contemporaneous record and have a clear school/setting process, including information about actions and impact in response.

Recording prejudice related incidents

Recording racist incidents was a recommendation of the 1999 MacPherson Report. In addition to in-school reporting procedures, sharing the data with the Local Authority allows the identification of patterns and contributes to the monitoring of the effectiveness of countywide strategy and training and the development of models of best practice.

The analysis of this data evidences how schools, settings and the Local Authority:

• Foster good relations
• Advance equality of opportunity
• Eliminate discrimination

These are requirements of the Equality Act.

How to decide if it is a prejudice related incident or bullying

A prejudice related incident is any incident which is perceived by the victim, or any other person, to be prejudiced towards an individual, due to one or more of the protected characteristics.

Bullying is behaviour by an individual or group, repeated over time, that intentionally hurts another individual or group either physically or emotionally. Three characteristics of bullying are:

• Deliberately hurtful (including aggression)
• Repeated often over a period of time
• Difficult for the victim to defend themselves against

Bullying may be because of a protected characteristic but this is not always the case.

A prejudice related incident may not be bullying. Bullying related to a protected characteristic would always be a prejudice related incident.