We ask children to live by rules we would refuse for ourselves, and then we are surprised when they stop believing their own perspective has any standing.

Every school in England is required to have an anti-bullying policy. Most spend considerable resource on its implementation: assemblies, PSHE lessons, peer mentoring schemes, reporting systems, restorative approaches.

The language is consistent across all of them. Bullying is the repeated, intentional behaviour of a more powerful party toward a less powerful one. It includes humiliation, exclusion, excessive criticism, the undermining of confidence, and the wielding of authority in ways that are arbitrary, inconsistent, or designed to control rather than support.

Now read that definition again, and consider how it describes the working conditions of a significant proportion of UK teachers.

Half of all school staff say their organisation's culture has a negative impact on their mental health. Research on teacher burnout consistently identifies being marginalised or bullied by colleagues and managers as a primary driver. An inspection system that teachers' unions have formally described as a health and safety risk, capable of producing suicidal ideation in head teachers, operates with precisely the dynamics we teach children to recognise and resist: sudden high-stakes judgment delivered by an authority whose standards shift, with consequences that feel catastrophic and processes that offer little genuine hearing.

The playground rules do not reach the staffroom. The frameworks we deploy to protect children from the harm of adults wielding power poorly are not applied to the adults experiencing the same dynamics from their own managers and the systems above them. We teach children that everyone deserves to feel safe, heard, and treated with consistency and fairness. We do not always build institutions that extend that guarantee to the teachers we ask to deliver it.

This is not an abstraction. A teacher who is being managed in ways that undermine their confidence and professional identity will, consciously or not, reproduce some of that dynamic in the classroom. Not because they are unkind. Because the environment they inhabit is shaping them in the same way that environments shape children.

The child in the correction-first classroom and the teacher in the criticism-first staffroom are experiencing different versions of the same institutional failure. An anti-bullying policy that does not apply to adults is not a complete anti-bullying policy. It is a children's policy. And children notice.