Working Together to Stop Bullying

Background The WTSB addressed the complex phenomenon of bullying behaviour among young people in their schools, local environment and online platforms. While some countries have adopted anti-bullying policies and guidelines, that is not the case everywhere. Also, the existing methods for addressing this issue need to be constantly adapted to the new circumstances and forms in which bullying occurs, as well as adjusted to the local needs/environment. Moreover, there is no coordinated approach against bullying and these measures are usually only implemented in the schools (by school teachers/administration) rarely relying on cooperation with civil society. Considering this, the project focused on developing a comprehensive approach in confronting bullying behaviour. We trained 24 teachers and youth workers in the Shared Concerned Method, efficient and effective to apply preventing and solving bullying. We also created an online platform www.endbullying.eu with a lot of information about the project, the method and the phenomenon. MOJU (Portugal), YEU (Belgium), APY Ngo (Armenia), and CID (North Macedonia) had a wonderful time sharing this project management and developed with the participants policy awareness and suggestions. Objectives The aim of the project was creating a comprehensive approach for addressing the issue of bullying in the educational system in the partner countries based on European best practices which will be adapted to their local context. We were able to achieve the following goals: - identify key gaps within the institutional response towards bullying within each partner country and developed suggestions for a tailored approach to address these issues; - share practices among the partner organisations for dealing with the phenomenon of bullying by created an international online platform; - train 24 teachers and youth workers to develop competences for identifying cases of bullying and to apply the adopted methodology in an efficient manner, and some of them provide training for others school actors; - raise awareness of the school staff/administration and the youth about the detrimental effect of bullying on the mental health and well-being of the young people, as well as the sensitivity - of dealing with this problematics; - enhance the capacity of (i) youth organisations/youth workers; (ii) young people within the schools (peer-to-peer approach) to provide additional support to the students affected by bullying. Implementation As part of the project, a set of carefully designed activities were implemented: - analysis report on current practices and gaps in addressing bullying behaviour with future recommendations. To realize that we also created google forms to colect data from the shcool students, teachers and other staff or organizations participants and youthworkers. Beside that, with the collected data we created infographics in order to share in a more visual way the results of our research; - training course on implementing Shared Concern Method on bullying; - implementation phase focusing on confronting bullying in schools: meetings with schools directors, training course replication, lectures in universitys, dissemination materials (social media posts, infographics, etc); - follow-up meeting on the lessons learned and future steps where we discuss each step of the process and future actions to take to achieve a policy level; - creating and launching an online platform against bullying with information about the project, the method and the phenomenom; - promoting a dissemination event about the project and online platform; - meetings throughout the project. Achievements O1 - Report Analysis (conducted throughout the entire project duration) targeted: (i) the current experiences with the issue of addressing bullying in different countries (including where the SCM has already been implemented); (ii) the existing gaps in confronting bullying; (iii) the possibility to include civil society organisations/youth workers/youth leaders for the purpose of developing a comprehensive approach; (iv) how to implement the SCM and anti-bullying policies in countries that have not dealt with this phenomenon (Armenia and North Macedonia). This analysis report is very innovative and, as far as the preliminary research of the project team goes, no document of this scope and scale has been produced thus far. Is already uploaded on the interactive online platform acessible to anyone throughout the website, as the infographics are there and in our social media. We had to elaborate and interview script and adapt for all languages in a online form; O2 - Interactive Online Platform against Bullying (www.endbullying.eu) were developed because there is no existing tool/platform in such a format. It will establish a forum where many new anti-bullying projects and activities will be initiated in the future. It will serve as a resource toolkit for the SCM method materials tailored to the needs of the communities from the partner countries. Also, it will allow the participants to share their gathered experiences, insights and best practices from the implementation phase, as well as the conclusions made during the follow-up meeting. The output will have a significant transferability potential as the platform will be open not only to the project participants, but also their peers/colleagues (including the ones from other countries). As result of this outputs we also did replication of the training course by the portuguese participants, among their teacher and school staff colleagues; Meetings with principals in Macedonia; Lecture at a Armenian University, among students of teacher course, about the method; Visual materials about the application of the method produced by the experts; Educational posts about the topic; News on media; a teacher from Portugal that had been participant in the project had the chance to participate in the evaluation meeting.