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School-based intervention research to reduce bullying in Australia 1999-2006: What works, what doesn’t and what’s promising?
by Donna Cross, Therese Shaw, Natasha Pearce, Erin Erceg, Stacey Waters, Yolanda Pintabona, Margaret Hall
School of Exercise, Biomedical and Health Sciences, Faculty of Computing, Health and Science, Edith Cowan University
Given the finite resources to address student bullying, schools need to identify the most parsimonious model of whole-of-school strategies that can consistently and successfully reduce bullying victimisation and perpetration experienced by school-age children.
Introduction
For the seven year period 1999 to 2006 the Friendly Schools and Families (FS&F) research team at the Child Health Promotion Research Centre, Edith Cowan University conducted a succession of 
longitudinal research projects with over 6,000 children, to systematically test in an Australian setting the effectiveness of theoretical and other evidence-based and promising processes to address mechanisms of bullying behaviour change. This iterative research began with a comprehensive formative trial to identify and validate with expert international researchers, contemporary research evidence of strategies to form part of universal, indicated and selective interventions. This year-long formative study informed the intervention design of a four-year randomised group efficacy trial called Friendly Schools (FS). The FS trial was used to confirm, alter and extend the theoretical model and guidelines for practice generated from the initial 
formative research. Impact and process findings from this efficacy trial were then used to design a more ‘real-world’ three-year randomised effectiveness trial, called Friendly Schools Friendly Families (FSFF), of those components found to be the most ‘active’ and missing from the efficacy trial. The results of the effectiveness trial have been used to rewrite and refine parts of the program for national dissemination. Currently this revised program called Friendly Schools and Families is being disseminated for adoption at a system level throughout Australia.
This paper describes the sequential trialling, development and refinement of the whole-of-school intervention components that formed the basis of these trials, to produce the Friendly Schools and Families bullying prevention program.
Background
Evidence of effective school-based bullying interventions has been sporadic [1] and research in this area risks being criticised for failing to demonstrate a consistent effect on bullying behaviour. This inconsistency of results can be attributed to bullying behaviour’s multi-level causality and the complexity and number of social, behavioural and environmental factors that can influence its occurrence. Consequently, there is a need to determine the range of ‘active ingredients’ - empirical, theoretical and promising mechanisms - necessary to reduce the likelihood of bullying in schools [2].
Until recently in Australia no empirical research had been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of interventions to address bullying behaviour in primary schools, yet reported prevalence of bullying with this age group was among the highest in the world [3]. Bullying is defined here as a repeated, unjustifiable behaviour that may be physical, verbal, and/or psychological. It is intended to cause fear, distress, or harm to another and is conducted by a more powerful individual or group against a less powerful individual who is unable to effectively resist [4, 5]. In Australia, approximately one in six school students report being bullied at least once a week and one in 20 report bullying others in the past six months [3, 6].
While primary school children of both genders report being bullied more frequently than secondary school students [3, 7, 8], social skills based interventions to ameliorate the harm from or reduce bullying in schools have been found to be more successful with this age group as they tend to be more supportive of a student who has been bullied than older children [5, 6, 9, 10]. They are also more pro-social and are more likely to want bullying to stop [5, 10, 11].
However, given bullying does not occur equally in all primary schools, our research initially sought to determine the risk and protective factors associated with bullying and what some primary schools were doing better than others to address these, and how these mechanisms were affecting positive change in the primary school environment.
To download this paper, click here (406KB)
Visit www.friendlyschools.com.au for more information