Thousands of students in primary schools across NSW and WA will be taught skills to handle bullying and develop resilience as part of a new research initiative.

Bullying poses a constant safety risk to children while they are at school and a project called Preventing Anxiety and Victimisation through Education or ‘PAVe’ is a combined university and government program designed to help children deal with bullying and its implications.

The cost of PAVe (just under $1.8 million) is being funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Federal Department of Education and Macquarie University.   PAVe will target over 5000 primary children from Years 3-6 across around 100 schools.  The program is limited to schools in NSW and WA due to the location of the PAVe researchers.

As part of the project, two programs will be randomly introduced individually or as a combination, in participating schools.  The programs are:

• Friendly Schools Plus: designed to enhance students’ social and emotional learning and foster prevention of bullying behaviours; and
• Cool Kids: Taking Control: designed to build resilience in bullying victims.

The objective of the programs is to help schools reduce all forms of bullying by developing a student’s social and emotional learning, building positive peer relationships, and empowering students to cope successfully with difficult situations.  Both programs also involve activities to educate and involve parents and staff.

At the end of the project, the PAVe researchers will compare and evaluate their effectiveness.  Depending on the outcome of the study, PAVe will make a formal recommendation to the Federal Government about the implementation of PAVe on a national scale.

And although the primary objective of the programs is to give children the skills to deal with bullying in the playground those skills will also help them with bullying that occurs online.  As explained in our earlier blog, cyber bullying is an issue being targeted by the Federal Government and PAVe is another important tool to assist schools and the community to combat bullying outside schools.

Any school (independent, government or Catholic) can participate in PAVe. If your school is interested, more information can be found here.