Friendly Schools & Families Materials
Whole-School
Policy Development Handbook
This policy development component provides a basis for action and behavioural change throughout the school community. Active consultation should be sought with all members of the school community including teaching staff, non-teaching staff, students, parents and the wider community. Establishing a clear policy and practice is the first step in managing bullying within a school.
Friendly Schools & Families research has found that schools that have:
- whole-school common understandings;
- a clear bullying reduction policy;
- consistent positive action;
- their school community highly committed to reducing bullying; and
- consistently implemented a wide variety of strategies to address bullying and increase social skills;
will see a reduction in reported bullying.
What is in the Policy Development Handbook?
Principles
for Success in Policy Development
The Principles for Success for Bullying Reduction in Schools provide a framework for developing and implementing whole-school programs to reduce bullying in schools. This handbook provides the Principles for Success that have been identified as critical to the successful development of Policy Development. It also includes information, strategies and samples of from real schools to engage the school community in discussion and planning toward a whole-school response to bullying.
School Snippets
Case study examples, called ‘School Snippets’, have been included throughout the handbooks. These are designed to illustrate in a practical way the guidelines and activities suggested within each handbook. Teachers and administrators from schools involved in the Friendly Schools Research and contributed to the ‘School Snippets’ based on their experiences implementing the Whole-school Program.
Schools involved in the Friendly Schools research project developed systems where the whole-school staff were beginning to communicate and share ideas about the individualised behaviour management plans of students to ensure they were dealt with in a consistent way. The development and continued improvement of the behaviour management recording system across the whole school helped schools to communicate information on specific students to the various staff members involved with those students, e.g. class teachers, duty teachers, support teachers, relief teachers.
Check out
When samples, toolkits or extra resources are available to support the particular principle being explained there will be a ‘check out’ symbol and then references to the information.
Tool kits
Included in the Policy Development tool kits are:
- Needs assessment and data gathering strategies;
- Detailed instructions on how to develop a bullying policy for your school;
- Samples of real policies;
- Ideas for involving students in policy development;
- Samples ideas for reporting and recording bullying incidents; and
- Schools case studies
Samples
Click each sample image below to see a larger version.
