Campaign to counter school bullying

AUCKLAND: Two independent watchdogs have launched a campaign to make all schools record every case of bullying and adopt antibullying moves that have been proven to work.

Children’s commissioner Andrew Becroft and new race relations commissioner Meng Foon say New Zealand’s high bullying rate — among the worst in the world — means the problem can no longer be left up to individual schools.

Mr Foon, who was bullied himself as a pupil in Gisborne, has decided to focus on schools so that racism can be ‘‘nipped in the bud’’ as early as possible in New Zealand lives.

‘‘Racism happens at school, and as race relations commissioner we need to start at school,’’ he said.

He wants schools to adopt

‘‘evidencebased programmes’’ such as a Finnish programme called KiVa, which now runs in 51 New Zealand schools and claims to have reduced bullying by 42% in schools where it has run for three years.

A 10yearold pupil at St Michael’s Catholic School in Remuera, said the school’s KiVa team helped him to choose three ‘‘supporters’’ in his Year 6 class after he was bullied.

‘‘People were throwing things at me and just kept on saying really rude things,’’ he said.

‘‘The principal got each one of those out of the class and talked to them about how . . . I wanted it all better.’’

School principal Ann McKeown said as soon as bullying became a repeated pattern, the KiVa team of senior teachers stopped seeking explanations and simply asked those doing the bullying, ‘‘What goals can you make that will ensure that you never do this again?’’

‘‘They’re goals like, ‘I’ll include them in my games,’ or ‘I will build people up rather than putting them down’,’’ she said.

‘‘In the majority of cases the bullying stopped.

‘‘There is not even a handful of cases where the bullying has been repeated.’’

New Zealand 15yearolds reported the secondhighest rate of bullying in the 35nation OECD in 2015, behind Latvia.

A quarter (26%) experienced some kind of bullying at least few times a month, most often saying ‘‘other students made fun of me’’ (17%).

The Education Review Office said in May that 38% of New Zealand schools were working towards a bullyingfree environment ‘‘to a great extent’’, 45% ‘‘to some extent’’ and 17% ‘‘to a limited extent’’.

Mr Becroft said the report revealed a ‘‘patchwork quilt’’ where bullying prevention was ‘‘not systematically driven in a forceful way’’.

‘‘It’s not good enough,’’ he said. ‘‘We need to be insisting that within six months, by the start of the next school year, every board of trustees in New Zealand needs to be able to clearly demonstrate and document consistently that there is a strategy that is in place, that the students have been involved in the design of, and it’s well known to the whole school, and it is being used, and that the incidence of bullying is coming down.’’

Mr Foon said the Ministry of Education should fund programmes like KiVa, which cost St Michael’s School $3200.

There are programmes right through schools, but they are not working, and the only one that is working, simply from an evidence base, is KiVa.’’

However the NZ Association of Counsellors school counsellors’ spokeswoman Jean Andrews said there was ‘‘a whole raft of evidencebased programmes’’ and the key was to build ‘‘a culture that is about restorative practice, inclusion and celebrating differences’’.

Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin said overseas experience suggested that ‘‘requiring schools to have a bullying prevention plan alone would be unlikely to prevent or reduce bullying’’.

‘‘This is an area, along with the collection of data, that is complicated by the independence of our school boards,’’ she said.

‘‘That said, it’s important that schools collect data to see how effective their approaches are and to chart change over time.’’ — The New Zealand Herald