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The “Cool School Programme” is an anti-bullying intervention for post-primary schools developed by the North Eastern Health Board’s Child Psychiatric Service. The programme is designed to support schools in developing effective strtegies to combat bullying behaviour.
It was developed for four main reasons:
- The serious psychological effects of bullying on children and teenagers is evident in relation to referrals to the Child Psychiatric Service. These include depression, psychosomatic problems, missing school, suicidal ideation and behaviour.
- Bullying has significantly long-term effects on self-esteem and interpersonal relationships.
- The great difficulty experienced by pupils, teachers, parents and health professionals in responding effectively to bullying.
- Bullying is a common hidden problem.
‘Friendship Week‘ is part of the Cool School Programme at Beech Hill College.
Implementation of Whole School Policy
The obvious benefit for schools in developing and implementing an effective whole-school policy lies in its power to reduce the overall level of bullying across the school community. The Cool School Programme encourages each school to address the totality of bullying problems in the school environment. This includes bullying between pupils, between pupils and teachers, between parents and teachers and between members of the teaching staff themselves.
Research in Scandanavia has shown that where a whole school intervention programme has been used:
- The effects of the programme were more marked after two years than one.
- There were significant reductions in bully/victim problems in school and there was no displacement of the problem to the journey to and from school.
- There was a reduction in general anti-social behaviour including vandalism, fighting, theft and truancy.
- There was a marked improvement in the social climate of classes, improved order and discipline, better social relationships and an improved attitude to schoolwork and to school.
- The intervention programme affected not only existing bullying problems but also reduced the numeber of new victims.
- There was an increase in student satisfaction with student life.
A safe environment is a pre-requisite for students to learn. It is no use teaching a curriculum in schools if students’ health and safety are being interfered with as part of the prevailing school climate. Bullying therefore has to be addressed in the wider context of the school’s social environment.
Reducing anti-bullying stategies to the level of curricular intervention only will not work and there is a large body of research to prove this (Olweus, Sharp and Smith). Indeed, implementation of comprehensive anti-bullying programmes have been found to reduce vandalism and anti-social behaviour in addition to significantly reducing bullying. Comprehensive anti-bullying programmes have also been shown to improve the social climate in schools, engender a more positive attitude in students towards school work, improve morale of teachers and pupils and increase student satisfaction with school life.
Below are some links: (These links are outside of the BHC Website and Beech Hill College accepts no responsibility for content of these sites.)
- TCD’s Anti-Bullying Unit
- From The Citizen’s Information Board
- Web-Wise: Information on safe use of Internet
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