You respond to recent online footage of pupil attack

Video footage of a schoolboy being punched and chased by bullies and posted online sparked a huge debate on our website.
Lennie Lake, aged 12, has been the victim of bullying at Cardinal Allen High School in FleetwoodLennie Lake, aged 12, has been the victim of bullying at Cardinal Allen High School in Fleetwood
Lennie Lake, aged 12, has been the victim of bullying at Cardinal Allen High School in Fleetwood

Kelly Martin, 43, says the bullying has become too much for her 12-year-old nephew Lennie Lake, who is a Year Eight pupil at Cardinal Allen High School in Fleetwood.

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Kelly, who has custody of her nephew, said: “The school phoned us up and said Lennie was in a fight.

“When he came home I asked what he had been doing and sent him up to his room, and about five minutes later he came downstairs and showed me the video.

“He was very upset.”

Andrew Cafferkey, headteacher at Cardinal Allen High School, did not comment on allegations Lennie was being bullied in school, but said: “The situation was dealt with and there was a consequence for the 
perpetrator.”

Here are your comments

I’ve had three children pass through the school system and known the parents of countless others. In my own experience and going off those related to me by friends and acquaintances I’m not aware of a single instance where bullying complaints were satisfactorily dealt with.

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What made me particularly angry is the school pre-emptively ringing the boy’s family and informing them their child had been in a fight. Along with the phrase ‘there was an incident involving your child’ this is something that most parents that have made a formal complaint about bullying will have heard before. Schools are obliged to keep logs of bullying instances and have to account to Ofsted for them and their procedures for dealing with it. It seems that invariably the school seeks to avoid having anything logged as a bullying incident at all so that it won’t colour Ofsted’s eventual report on them.

All my children left the system prior to every young person having a mobile and being on social media. They’re accessible to bullies (and worse) pretty much 24/7 and I’d say that both being a young person and a parent of the same is probably a lot more challenging then when I was raising children. More than ever children need pastoral care at school, their emotional and physical welfare is vital - but frequently that seems to come second to a school’s desire to present a clean sheet both to Ofsted and to the parents of prospective pupils.

Sarcastic

Bullies are everywhere - after all, children are just small people and people can be vile. However the way the school deals with it is testament to how strong or weak a headteacher is. It takes a strong head to openly admit there is a problem and to tackle it head on. I don’t doubt that what we see here is not the full story, but it is disappointing that the school chose not to comment on the bullying aspect.

Slowlylosingthewill

I have just been through something similar with my son, the school wasn’t safeguarding him well enough. It was horrible having to force him to go to school knowing he was being bullied, it got so bad I had to pull him out of school. He started his new school yesterday and I have my happy smiling boy back. I hope the same happens to this poor boy I really wish him well for the future

Tina Marshall

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Whoever filmed this needs to look at their actions as well. Filming instead of helping. How disgraceful, you are no better than them. I hope this child gets into a decent school where this kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable.

Tracy Byrne

Who breeds these kind of children? If either of my sons ever did anything like this they’d not sit down for a week! That poor little lad

Kelly Collins

Cannot believe they just stand there filming it .That makes them as bad as the bully .What has gone wrong in society where the youth of today think it’s normal and acceptable to see someone being attacked and beaten?

Elaine Butterworth

I know from experience how frightened he must have been. I have drummed into my son how wrong bullying is and if he were to see it he should intervene and stop it. I would be mortally ashamed if the bully was my child.

Julia King

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I have said on more than one occasion in the past, my daughter has witnessed behaviour in schools that would get you arrested outside a pub in Blackpool.

This is a graphic example of what she was on about. We are all equal under the law – playground or pub – in makes no difference. The police need to interview those responsible under caution.

PNE in Lasherland

Bullies destroy children’s lives. It’s not just physical, it’s the mental cruelty it inflicts, making them dread each day. When caught, bullies should be excluded permanently, so their families are inconvenienced and disrupted. A telling off is useless as a punishment. People will say toughen up, it happens all the time but that does NOT make it acceptable

Mark Mason

More efforts need to be made to make children aware of the effects that bullying can have on the victim. Young children are going as far as commiting suicide due to the mental effects of bullying

Chris Lisgo Preece

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Let the family of the bullied child deal with the bullies. I can promise you, they would not do it again.

FSociety

Victims suffer long term problems after bullying, it’s time bullies also felt the long term effects

Wrukstar

Most bullies do it to show off so when they get a good pasting when their mates aren’t around (as well as a little word in the ear about what happens the next time they pull that stunt) they tend to leave well alone.

It’s very true that the majority of bullies are cowards

BrianStorm

Imagine the old headteacher Cyril Rooney putting up with this...

Old fat bloke from Bispham

Get him to my boxing gym - we are called Blackpool Fightworks - we will look after him! First two sessions free

Jeff Thomas

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