How to Make Time for Bullying Prevention in Schools

Have you ever started the day thinking you might finally have time to work on your school’s bullying prevention program, only to have something urgent come up?

Suddenly, it’s the end of the day and you haven’t touched it.

Almost every school counsellor we talk with says some version of the same thing: “I want to put prevention in place, but I can’t get out of the day-to-day.”

That’s what makes bullying prevention in schools so difficult to prioritize. When a student needs help right now, of course that takes your attention. But if prevention always gets pushed to tomorrow, when do you actually get ahead of the problems you’re responding to every day?

Prevention Has to Work on Busy Days, Too

Waiting for a quiet week probably isn’t going to work. There will always be an unexpected situation that needs your attention, particularly if you’re the person students and teachers turn to when something goes wrong.

Instead, think about how prevention can continue even when you’re pulled away.

A program that’s simple enough for teachers to pick up and use on their own can make a big difference. Our 12 Ways to Walk Away with Confidence program, for example, gives staff step-by-step lessons they can work through with students without special training or a lot of preparation.

The prevention work can still happen in classrooms, even when your day doesn’t go according to plan.

You Don’t Need Hours Every Week

Making bullying prevention a priority doesn’t mean finding a huge empty block in the timetable.

Even 15 minutes a week can give students a chance to talk about a new idea and practise what they might do when they find themselves in a difficult situation. When teachers already have the material in front of them, those few minutes become much easier to protect.

You don’t have to begin with the entire school, either. If rolling something out across every grade feels impossible right now, start where you can. Work with one grade or focus on an issue that keeps coming up, then see how students respond.

Start With What You Can Keep Going

There will always be something urgent that needs your attention, so prevention has to be able to survive those days. If it only happens when you have an empty afternoon, it probably won’t happen very often.

Start with what you can realistically manage. Give teachers something they can continue without you, even if that means beginning with one grade or a few minutes each week. Once it becomes familiar, you can decide what makes sense to add next.

You may not be able to stop the day-to-day problems from landing on your desk, but you can start putting something in place that helps prevent some of them from getting there in the first place.