BULLYING is a problem that needs to be addressed. Various organisations are calling for various solutions, with pressure growing for some sort of "bullying tsar" to be introduced to oversee the problem.

This sounds quite attractive, but the performance of the drugs tsar does not suggest that a bullying tsar will produce any answers.

Surely it is teachers, who face these problems daily, who are more likely to find the answers.

While we are loathe to impose more paperwork and non-teaching activities on already hard-pressed school staff, there does appear to be a need for each school to identify a teacher who is responsible for anti-bullying measures.

In many schools, this already happens. In fact, our survey of schools in the North-East yesterday showed that many are already making innovative and valuable attempts to tackle the problem.

But they appear to be doing it in isolation. They get little guidance from the Government and there seems to be no formal mechanism for the sharing of best practice. There seems to be no network whereby teachers responsible for anti-bullying measures can talk to each other, either at a localised conference or through a phone call, and find out which techniques are working and which ones are failing.

Before we think about a national tsar, shouldn't we be encouraging our own expert teachers to help each other and to prevent any more truly tragic cases like that of Elaine Swift?

Bad news for Byers

IT IS becoming increasingly difficult to defend the Transport Secretary Stephen Byers.

The recently-released minutes of his meeting with Railtrack leaders were incomplete and inconclusive. Mr Byers is neither exonerated nor condemned by them.

However, he is condemned by the manner in which they were released. They emerged at 3.35pm on Tuesday - just five minutes after Gordon Brown had begun what could be an era-defining Pre-Budget Statement.

This timing looks suspiciously as if it was engineered to bury the minutes' inconclusiveness. Mr Byers protests that it was merely coincidental.

But his department has form in this respect. He may have shown commendable loyalty by standing by his advisor who advised that bad news should be buried in the aftermath of September 11, but if he is still employing advisors who cannot see the folly of releasing important news when the Chancellor is on his feet, he is in greater difficulty than he imagines.