The ABC (Anti-Bullying Certification) project aims to develop a certification process to support schools in developing an effective anti-bullying policy, which includes sensitive attention to more general social inclusion and to 21th Century conflict solving skills among both students and school staff. The certification procedure is not just a “check” of written anti-bullying procedures but also contains a social analysis and needs assessment, integration of ongoing goal setting and planning, staff and student training and a guide pointing to effective measures to structurally enhance the school learning and working climate. A key aspect of all this is how students and teachers deal with conflicts and whether the school functions as a model of non-violent problem solving skills and methods which are lodged in role-modelling democracy. The main aim of the certification process is not to prescribe best practices to the school but to enhance ownership and making own choices in an appropriate school policy. The project has 5/6 partners, each working with one or two schools in their own country. The project partners start the project by elaborating a draft certification proposal, which has been developed by Centro Montesca and reviewed in the European Anti-Bullying Network, into a testable toolkit. They also undertake a national review of anti-bullying and social inclusion policies as well as needs assessments in the allied schools by doing research among students and staff and by carrying out a school visitation. In the schools, this is the first step of the certification process. In the schools, the second step is to analyse the assessment results and decide about necessary measures. Then the implementation follows during one school year. A staff training is a key element in any strategy. Another key element of successful anti-bullying strategies is organizing “golden weeks” at the start of the school year, during which student get to know each other, built social group process and agree about rules for pro-social behaviour. At the end of the school year, the impact of the pro-social/anti-bullying strategies is evaluated. The project ends six months later. This gives the schools the opportunity to organize the “golden weeks” in an improved way. It gives the other partners the opportunity to review the certification procedure, the training and the manual on effective measures, to translate, publish and disseminate them. This is done during multiplier meetings in the participating countries and in Brussels. After the project period, the European Anti-Bullying Network (EAN) will sustain the certification strategy by stimulating her members to implement the procedure (at a cost-covering rate) in their own countries. EAN will also periodically update the procedure, the toolkit and the EAN certification training. To cover these European level costs, EAN will register the "EAN Certification Procedure" as a trademark and incorporate the costs for quality maintenance in the European certification training.
The ABC (Anti-Bullying Certification) project aimed to develop a certification process to support high schools in developing an effective antibullying policy. The developed certification procedure is not just a “check” of written antibullying procedures but also contains an interactive needs assessment during which students and teachers get the chance to codevelop the improved antibullying policy. The main aim of this certification process is not to prescribe best practices to the school but to enhance ownership and making own choices in an appropriate school policy. When the project started we had seven partners. EAN, the European Antibullying Network was the “nest” from which the project idea developed and this international federation of NGOs and schools is also responsible for the sustainability of the certification. The six other partners each worked with one or two schools in their own country to experiment with the development of the certification process. Halfway the project, we discovered that the schools needed to be full prayer partners to be eligible for the travel costs and we filed an amendment to make this so. At the end of the project we had 11 partners. Some of the schools did not register a formal partner. Like we planned in their proposal, the certification consists of four products: 1. A manual for the process 2. Quantitative needs assessment surveys for students and teachers 3. A guide for a qualitative needs assessment by students and teachers (a student “visitation” and a teacher workshop; later called “reviews”) 4. A toolkit with an overview of possible antibullying interventions With the help of the 5 original NGO partners, the 10 schools experimented with the procedure in the school years 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. In 2018 and 2019 we also organized to elaborate school exchanges, in which we combined student and teacher meetings in order to stimulate open communication between students and teachers. During this experimentation we encountered a number of challenges. One challenge was that schools had very little knowledge about what works to make an effective antibullying policy. The international exchanges, teacher workshops, products and newsletters were used to increase his knowledge. Another challenge was the idea of certification. We discovered that we could not develop a formal ISO-certification because the partnership did not have a partner that is certified to grant such certificates. EAN approached a formal ISO-certification institute to attempt to develop this in addition to the ABC-project. A connected challenge was that we had discussion about if and how we wanted to score schools on the quality of their antibullying policy, and if we would do that, which criteria would be chosen to score schools on. These challenges were not completely resolved because partners disagreed on the need for scoring and on the quality criteria. It was decided to focus the final products on a self-assessment, and procedural document which outlines criteria and offers a tentative scoring list, but ultimately to leave the scoring to the self-evaluation of the schools. To sustain the results, the project intended to create a discussion with local, national and European stakeholders about the need to raise the quality of antibullying policy of high schools. From our needs assessments of the European situation in the national contexts, it became clear that the needs and possibilities for such policy improvement or discussion about improvement varied in each country. Still, the broad dissemination of the project and the discussions in the final phase of the project created a wide interest. This was despite the fact that we could not organize the final school exchange and meetings with politicians in Brussels, and six of the seven multiplier meetings due to limitations of the COVID-19 measures. As far as we could, we replaced those life meetings with online events and activities. EAN was provided with a manual on how to create a franchise system, in which certification or school self-evaluation trainers could be trained and equality of this work monitored. The project also delivered the training manual for such consultants. At the end of the project, we did an impact evaluation survey among participants, our stakeholders and interested persons. This evaluation showed that the self-evaluation products we developed created great interest. To our surprise, the participants in the project had become so confident in that the self-evaluation results in an improved antibullying policy, that they were after the project more in favour of scoring and even of mandatory reporting of the scores, in comparison to stakeholders who did not practically take part in the project pilots. This shows that the method creates a high level of self-assuredness.