Irish Parliament and Senate Education Committee Correspondence between Professor Salmivalli and Professor Downes
One central concern of the monograph published by the EU Commission 2016 on school bullying, led by Professor Paul Downes, Professor of Psychology of Education, Director, DCU Educational Disadvantage Centre, is to highlight the strong interplay between early school leaving and school bullying prevention to inform common system design and policy reform strategies for these issues across Europe and internationally.
This concern has influenced the European Union’s Council Recommendation of 28 November 2022 on Pathways to School Success and replacing the Council Recommendation of 28 June 2011 on policies to reduce early school leaving (Text with EEA relevance) 2022/C 469/01.
This ‘flagship’ EU initiative in education seeks integrated strategies across Europe for both early school leaving and bullying prevention. The EU Council Recommendation recognises the need for:
“integrating national, regional and local strategic approaches (as appropriate) to preventing early leaving from education and training with those aimed at promoting basic skills, addressing bullying and cyberbullying (including gender-based bullying and sexual harassment) and supporting well-being;”
A second key concern of this monograph (Downes, P. & Cefai, C. (2016). How to tackle bullying and prevent school violence in Europe: Evidence and practices for strategies for inclusive and safe schools. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union/EU bookshop) is to offer detailed critique of a specific aspect of the internationally leading KiVa programme for bullying prevention in schools, pertaining to this model’s peer challengers/defenders approach in school bullying situations.
Against this backdrop, Professor Christina Salmivalli, University of Turku, Finland, the leader of the KiVa research team, and Professor Paul Downes engaged in a written correspondence for the Irish Joint Oireachtas (Parliament and Senate) Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science in 2024. This written communication was to the Chairperson of the Irish Joint Oireachtas (Parliament and Senate) Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Paul Kehoe TD and cc’d to Professor Downes. This correspondence is available for view here. The correspondence was circulated to Members of the Joint Oireachtas (Irish Parliament and Senate) Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.
The correspondence refers to the Joint Oireachtas Education Committee meeting contribution of Professor Downes:
It also draws on the article Downes, P. & Cefai, C. (2019). Strategic Clarity on Different Prevention Levels of School Bullying and Violence: Rethinking Peer Defenders and Selected Prevention. Journal of School Violence, 18 (4) 510-521