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6 FACULTY OF EDUCATION THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
Tackling school bullying
through research
The effects of bullying are multi-faceted. It affects a student’s
engagement at school and can ultimately impact on their
achievement and future potential. One dedicated teacher is
researching interventions to help.
“I always wanted to be a teacher but I didn’t think I was smart
enough,” says Nicole Price. Her statement is hard to swallow. She
is, after all, being interviewed about her research and PhD study.
“I started with a BA in Fashion Design and Technology, I had
my own knitwear label,” she says. “Then I had children”.
A year after giving birth to her second daughter, Nicole
decided to follow her heart and her dream to become a secondary
school teacher specialising in food, materials and technology.
Now a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education and an
Educational Change Agent at Team Solutions, Nicole is about to
embark on the second leg of her research journey aimed at tackling
school bullying – a serious issue that has not only impacted Nicole
on a professional level but a personal one too.
In 2009, Nicole’s 14-year-old daughter was viciously attacked
by a group of girls who went to the same school as her. It was
10pm on a Friday and her daughter was leaving a YMCA dance
party in Auckland when the girls made their attack. The assault
was so brutal she was hospitilised with significant injuries to her
head and face. Her self-esteem and confidence had also taken a
beating.
The unprovoked attack was the result of a campaign of bullying
that unfolded on school grounds and online after school.
In the months following the attack Nicole’s daughter wagged
school and her achievement dropped.
“It’s not just bullying that’s the issue. It’s bigger than that
because it is linked to engagement, achievement and truancy,”
Nicole says.
As a mother and a teacher Nicole struggled to find answers to
her daughter’s problems and quickly learned they weren’t the only
ones suffering.
Although she had dealt with bullies and victims during her 13
years as a high school teacher, it was her daughter’s traumatic
experience that motivated her to dig deeper into the issue for other
students and their whānau.
“It’s about making a difference for all the other kids going
through it and helping the families through that transition. I
struggled to understand my daughter and what she was going
through.”
Frustrated with a lack of answers, Nicole wrote a book Y Do U
H8 Me, which explains the raw encounters of bullying, in particular
cyber bullying.
“There is no guide for parents about how to deal with bullying.
I asked for help and there was none. So this was written by me as
a parent for other parents, but I’m not taking ownership of it as it’s
really the voice of adolescents and what they thought.”
While teaching at Massey High School, Nicole became
“hooked” on studying after completing a mentoring paper through
the Faculty of Education, followed by postgraduate study.
In 2012 Nicole won a Ministry of Education study award, which
she used to help find the answers she had been looking for by
embarking on a Master of Education.
Nicole’s masters research investigated the different perceptions
of bullying between students, teachers and school management.
She focused on three key aspects: what is bullying, how is it
identified and reported, and what provisions are in place? She also
looked at the difference in perceptions around existing bullying
policies.
Key findings revealed teachers and students often shared
beliefs about what bullying is, but they differed when it came to the
identification of bullying.
“Teachers believed they saw bullying and that it was being
reported to them but in actual fact many kids weren’t reporting it
to adults. So there was a lot of bullying happening that they didn’t
know about.”
The research proved Nicole’s theory that schools do not have
the time or resources to put a strong anti-bullying programme in
place, nor do they track the right data.
She says schools kept a record of “problem children” and their
behavioral issues but there was no record kept of the children who
had been bullied.
Nicole Price