Bullying is one of the most difficult issues that schools have to deal with. Over the decades, it has remained a persistent problem, despite countless interventions designed to tackle it.
Much research has also focused on bullying. For example, my colleague Daniel Muijs has studied the relationship between bullying prevalence in primary schools and the school-based factors that affect this.
Surveys were conducted with 1,411 Year 6 pupils and 68 teachers in 35 primary schools in four local authorities. The surveys covered a range of factors, including pupils’ bullying behaviours, teachers’ views on school policies and processes, school inspection reports and secondary data on school conditions and pupil characteristics.
The analysis showed that school-based factors, including school policies, have a substantial effect on the prevalence of bullying.
But, of course, bullying isn’t only an issue for UK schools - it is a universal problem. And while bullying is widely acknowledged as one of the most harmful events in a child’s life, it is rarely studied from an international perspective, using large-scale international data.
This is exactly what I set out to do when I recently completed a study of data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss). As we had previously seen that school factors played an important role, our main focus was: to what extent do these factors affect bullying prevalence?
How do we stamp out bullying in schools?
To answer this question, we adopted a “multi-level” lens, looking at country-level factors (such as the type of education system); school-level factors (such as school culture and policies); and pupil-level factors (such as socio-economic status and gender).
The countries we looked at were the USA, Finland, England, Romania, Korea and Italy. And because the results of some of the most well-known anti-bullying programmes stem from the period 2008-2011, we looked primarily at data from the end of this period.
So what did we find? Firstly, we found little evidence of a relationship between country-level factors and bullying.
However, when it came to school- and pupil-level factors, the results were more varied. The most consistent relationship was between gender and bullying, with the prevalence being higher amongst boys. School factors, on the other hand, were not found to be significant.
This is important because it suggests that “one-size-fits-all” bullying policies might not be the best course of action. Some have posited, for example, that disorderly behaviour during lessons affects levels of bullying in a school. But a quick, informal analysis of Timss 2019 data shows that, in England, there is only a very modest correlation between disorderly behaviour and bullying.
That is not to say that disorderly behaviour does not need to be addressed, of course. The prevalence of disorderly behaviour and the prevalence of bullying can separately affect attainment levels - and this might give the appearance of a direct relationship.
But our international analysis makes it clear that bullying is too complex to be stamped out simply by telling students not to do it and by introducing a centralised “anti-bullying” policy.
Instead, we need to unpick the complexity of the issue, focusing on the interplay between individual, classroom and school factors.
That does not mean that sensible rules and creating a safe culture in the school aren’t important - but it does show that the job of tackling bullying doesn’t end there.
Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies
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