The Chair of General Purpose Standing Committee No 2, the Hon Robyn Parker MLC, today tabled the Committee’s report on the bullying of children and young people, saying the inquiry clearly demonstrated that there needs to be a concerted effort to address bullying, particularly given that in the most extreme cases, bullying can result in the loss of young lives to suicide.

“When you consider that more 570,000 calls are received yearly by the national Kids Helpline service and almost half of those are from NSW – and the State Government doesn’t provide funding to the service - clearly our State is not doing enough to help kids in distress,” Robyn Parker said.

“Bullying can have long lasting and harmful affects on a child’s self-esteem, mental health, school performance and well-being. This inquiry has found that there needs be far greater co-ordination between departments and Government agencies on the roll-out of bullying programs to reduce duplication and school communities need more support and guidance to develop and implement successful, evidence based responses to bullying and cyber-bullying.

“The committee was alarmed at the growing prevalence of cyber-bullying, which is more insidious in nature, having a heightened impact due to its ability to reach into the private domain of a child or young person. The committee is also concerned that the Commonwealth’s National Secondary Schools Computer Fund does not provide any support or professional development to schools on cyber-bullying.

“The committee found that Schools are overwhelmed by the sheer number of anti-bullying programs, some of which lack rigorous evaluation. Schools need the flexibility to decide which anti-bullying programs best suits their community and teachers must receive better training to ensure that they are equipped with the knowledge and tools to prevent and intervene in incidents of bullying.

“The NSW Department of Education needs to provide schools with clear guidelines that outline their responsibilities, the department should centrally collect information on the effectiveness of school anti-bullying policies and audit this information.”

The committee has made 25 recommendations, including: the employment of additional School Liaison Police and school counsellors; a blueprint for schools to determine which anti-bullying program is best suited to them; that the Attorney General examine the adequacy of the existing legal framework for bullying related offences; recurrent financial support to the Kids Helpline; the implementation of uniform procedures for collecting bullying and bullying related data from NSW schools and TAFE; and that the Minister for Education require all schools to publish their anti-bullying policies online.