Prague, Dec 1 (CTK) – Forty percent of Czech ten-year-old students were victims of school bullying, daily Pravo writes on Thursday, citing the TIMSS 2015 international survey.
The survey showed that 28 percent of the students faced bullying once a month and 12 percent faced it once a week.
However, most of the Czech students said they have been bullied very rarely or never, the paper writes.
The survey indicated that the more often students were bullied, the worse results in mathematics and natural sciences they achieved.
According to the survey, bullying among Czech 10 year olds was slightly less frequent than is the average in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The authors of the survey asked whether their schoolmates mocked the students or called them names, whether they spread lies about them, stole something from them, hit or injured them, forced them to do something against their will or threatened them.
Based on questionaries sent to head teachers, the Czech School Inspectorate concluded that 30 percent of Czech schools dealt with bullying last year.
Child psychologist David Cap said this number is lower than in the international survey probably because some students are victims of bullying, however, they do not tell about it to anybody, or they tell somebody but the case is not dealt with.
He said some schools did not have to deal with bullying as they had intensive and quality prevention programmes, while others underestimated bullying and it was therefore more frequent.
“Unfortunately, it still happens that some school managements bury their heads in the sand and try to play down the issue,” Cap told Pravo.
Almost no Czech head teacher complained about disobedient students. Two thirds of them said their schools did not have to deal with unacceptable behaviour and the rest said discipline was only a small problem.
“The media create the impression that children are vulgar, cheeky and hit teachers, that all the children are bad and disobedient,” Cap said, adding that this impression is false.
All teachers had some students whom they were unable to discipline, but this occurred to them only very seldom, he said.
