Dr. Angela Mazzone:

As the Deputy said, anti-bullying policies are important. As we have shown in our submission, however, teachers or other school staff and even parents may not integrate the school-level changes or contribute to such change or even to the policies. The school may tick the boxes and have the policy but, for instance, children might not be even aware of the policies. Perhaps we need to make the policies available in an accessible language for the children. That is the first step but it is clearly not enough. In the international context there are countries where one anti-bullying programme has been implemented nationwide based on research. If there is lots of fragmentation and lots of commercial programmes, they might not work. Programmes should be evidence-based. We need to rely on evidence-based programmes. They have proved effective in other nations because they are grounded in theory and research, updated regularly and receive support from the state or the ministry of education. Finland, for example, has a national anti-bullying programme which is implemented in 95% of schools across the country. A national evidence-based programme could help, but these programmes should be also sensitive to the context. We need to adjust them to the needs of each context. In addition, bullying is a very complex phenomenon. Deputy Conway-Walsh mentioned the bus driver. Bullying happens especially when supervision is low, so we need to involve everyone, all social actors. That is the main idea in the whole-school approach. With bullying, children are embedded in many social contexts, so it is essential to involve all those social contexts and raise awareness about the problem. In addition, children need consistent messages. The message they get in school should be in line with the messages they get in other contexts, online and offline.