“I was at a boarding school and you’d share a room with six or eight other girls. And they played a prank on me… where they had tied a polo stick… and made a booby trap so that when I opened the door so that it would swing and hit me in the face and that was the joke… to see if they could break my nose.”

Mille Mackintosh

“One minute you’re having a good time with your friend… the next minute you’re being told ‘at least I’m not black’… or I’d be made fun of because of my gappy teeth… I hated smiling, I always hated smiling.”

Brian Whittaker

“My mum would say ‘enjoy school and I’ll see you tonight’ and I’d murmur under my breath ‘yeah I’ll see you tonight if I’m still alive’… you felt at times that if I ended my own life that that was the only way to get away from the pain of bullying.”

Nigel Owens

“The worst moment was the last day of school and they said to me ‘once today is finished, that’s it.. there’s no rules and we are going to kill you… we’re going to wait for you after school and we’re going to get you’ and so I hid.”

Andrea McLean

“The biggest thing for me was feeling very isolated [because of the bullying] because I was away from home… I didn’t want to be the one who was being a baby… but there’s only so much a person can deal with before you say enough is enough.”

Cel Spellman

“I come from a family of Russian and Polish immigrants… there was a lot of anti-semitism, lots of Holocaust jokes… there were quite a few kids that would tell me that the Holocaust didn’t happen. There was a joke that used to go around about the Yids ‘how many Yids can you fit a mini? 6 million but they’ve all got to be in the ashtray’… things like that.”

Tracy Ann-Oberman

“When I came back from Beijing, that’s when everything changed. They took the mick out of what I was wearing on the diving board, they would throw stuff at me at lunchtime, it became a thing that diving was becoming a burden.”

Tom Daley

“Some of the things that happened to me would definitely be described now as sexual harassment… If you were a girl and wore a white t-shirt, the girls would get a fire hose and spray you down so they could see your underwear.”

Cathy Newman

“I got racist abuse growing up…. It got me upset, I was angry… I’ve got young kids now- 9, 7 and 5- I don’t want to see them being bullied, but I also stress to them I don’t want to see you bullying anyone… I would of made a great Anti-Bullying Ambassador”

Rio Ferdinand

“I would be punched in the stomach whenever I was seen in the corridors, and told that I would to be ‘cut up and hidden under the floorboards”

James McVey, The Vamps