Ms Julie de Bailliencourt:

The Diana award has been a fantastic partner. The peer-to-peer education is something that we identified early on as being effective to share best practices. Simply put, young people do not want to hear from us. What their friend will tell them about how to approach the online world works far better than us pushing out education messages, which we do anyway. However, we know that this peer-to-peer education works really well.

There are two sides. There is the training that the Diana award does in schools where it will train some staff members and some students to become those anti-bullying ambassadors. This applies to best practices, online and offline. It is not only about the online world. There are a lot of videos and items that we will share with the members later on to explain how it works. Some of those bring it to life far more than what I could tell the Deputy. Basically, it is about empowering children to speak up, not be a bystander, and not be afraid of speaking to someone they trust, which would usually be a peer. This is hugely important.

We have seen amazing things coming out of the schools about the Diana award work, and it involves children from the age of five onwards. It is not a 13 years plus initiative. It can start very early. This is a project that we were involved with. Obviously, it uses Facebook as an educational tool and as a resource for teachers. The message is important. It is that young people love technology and will really latch onto it. Our goal here is to empower parents and teachers not to be afraid of the technology and to go where their children are and use this as a tool.

We believe that technology is neutral. One gets what one puts into it. In those cases, we are here to highlight how one can use a tool, such as Facebook, to achieve the same goal, which is to push a positive message and engage the community. I am touching on what Senator Noone mentioned earlier - positive messages around not being a bystander, speaking up when one faces issues, and speaking up when one faces mental well-being troubles. There is still huge stigma in the country and beyond on those topics, and having young people saying it is not cool to behave in a particular way and that they are going to reach out to a friend to help solve the situation is powerful. We are very much behind any initiative that would replicate this.

The Diana award is one of the partners we have worked with and those involved in it have been amazing.