Dr. Paul Downes:

To amplify the point on bridge-building or non-threatening activities, such as the example of the play that Professor Hymel gave, a trust-building exercise is needed here. If we go straight to saying there is a bullying problem and a particular parent's child may be the one at fault, and we want to bring them into a universal parenting programme on that basis, parents may feel quite threatened by that. It is about trying to get in earlier with the social and emotional education and softer parenting programme approaches. It could include a range of health-based issues such as sleep-awareness issues or a range of other dimensions.

I reiterate that there needs to be different sites of engagement, such as community locations, where families may feel more at ease and where there is a social element, as well as the family centre dimension, where programmes can be run. There should be community outreach, school outreach into the home and outreach to individual families. There are home-visiting programmes, both for early years children and at primary school level, whereby there are visits to the homes of families where there are known to be major issues of mental health, domestic violence or conflict.

We need to have that multidimensional outreach approach but it should be more than just an information-based model. It is also about how parents may co-construct some of the solutions. One of the criticisms we made in our report for the European Commission was that much international research tended to treat parents passively. They were treated just as objects of information rather than being seen as co-constructers of material that may have been of relevance for, first, wider social and emotional education, and bullying as a dimension of that.