Hi everybody, Neil Patterson here with the Sky News Daily. Good to have you with us.

Just a warning up top on the podcast today, we will be discussing issues around sexism, racism and thoughts of suicide.

The topic for today, bullying in schools, but believe me, it's not what you are thinking.

Rather than that which takes place in the playground,

it's bullying in the staff room that we'll be discussing.

Teachers, bullying other teachers.

And in many occasions, it is leading to staff leaving their jobs,

often receiving payouts from education budgets,

but with silence often as a condition.

Amelia Harper is this guy correspondent who is covering the story for us.

What put you on to this?

It's the scale of the problem, I think, that's interesting.

Yeah, I've spoken to over 320 teachers as part of this investigation.

And I started seeing grumblings from a few teachers on social media. So then reached out to them to ask them, you know, what what it was about that they were sort of, you know, talking about. And it just grew from there. They put me in touch with further teachers, word of mouth. You know, it just absolutely ballooned until I had nearly one email a minute from teachers

all wanting to come forward to tell their story. But crucially, many of them are very

fearful of the repercussions of doing so. You know, they wanted to come on conditions of

anonymity. If we do tell their story, there must be anonymous. So it was really stark just

actually the sheer volume of people that I spoke to, and I spoke to all of them. Well, let's just

have a listen to two of those that you've been speaking to directly. As you say, we've changed

their names. We're referring to them as Maya and Tracy and we have revoiced their statements.

Let's just have a listen in and hear what the problem actually is in schools for Maya and indeed for Tracy.

I'm visibly different. I'm a different colour and obviously I think that comes with a stereotype.

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