Discrepancies in school staff’s awareness of bullying

Abstract

Bullying is a severe problem for school students in many education systems. We know that the role of principals and teachers is vital for detecting and following up on bullying, and for implementing appropriate measures. Staff awareness of bullying in schools is commonly reported to be far lower than students' own reports, but this is rarely studied from a comparative perspective. This study assesses reported bullying from the perspectives of students, teachers and principals in schools in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We examine the association between the school administration's awareness of bullying among their pupils, student reports of bullying, and the information and measures put in place at schools in each country. We use comparative analyses of the International Civic and Citizen-ship Education Study (ICCS 2016) data from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden (students, N = 18,962; teachers, N = 6,119; school principals, N = 630). The prevalence of students' reports of bullying are similar across the four countries, but we find large discrepancies in the prevalence of bullying re-ported by students, teachers and principals. Whereas Norwegian schools are most active in employing measures to inform and raise awareness about bullying for staff, parents and students, Finnish teachers and principals were observed to be far more aware of their students' bullying than their Nordic counter-parts.

Using IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) Data: Northern Lights on ICCS

“…We hope this Nordic endeavor and lenses will supplement previous analyses that have focused mostly on individual national results of ICCS in this region. Today, only a limited number of academic works are published based on ICCS beyond the national reports, e.g., comparing national data of ICCS 2009 and 2016 (Hegna 2018a, b;Stray and Huang 2018) or comparing ICCS 2016 results across countries on student attitudes (Huang et al 2018) and on school and teacher variables (Cheah and Huang 2019;Eriksen and Huang 2019;Hu and Huang 2019). The topics included in this book are relevant for policymakers, researchers, school principals, and teachers who are working and interested in the Nordic models of civic and citizenship education and democracy.…”

“…This chapter addresses this gap (Westheimer 2015;Saetra and Stray 2019b). One problem with the ICCS studies, at least in the Nordic countries, is the limited number of research reports from the dataset on educators' responses (Eriksen and Huang 2019;Hu and Huang 2019;Saetra and Stray 2019a, b). The students' results are expected to be, at least partially, an outcome of the schools' efforts.…”