Wellbeing@School provides schools with self-review toolkits to build a safe and caring climate that deters bullying. There are two tools for schools to use - Wellbeing@School, and the Inclusive Practices Toolkit. 

Both tools are free, confidential, evidence-based and locally designed. NZCER manages the Wellbeing@School toolkit and website - below you will find more information about each. 

Features of Wellbeing@School

Wellbeing@School is designed around a self-review cycle, and offers a range of resources:

• two W@S Student Surveys (Years 5-8 and 7-13)
• the W@S School Self Review Tool
• the W@S Teacher Survey
• next step planning modules
• a comprehensive range of online survey reports.

The self-review tools explore how different layers of school life contribute to creating a safe and caring climate.

Schools can use this application to confidentially store data, access reports of their data, find suggestions for next steps actions, and track changes over time.

All New Zealand schools can register to use the tools. The principal must agree to the terms of use for website and tools.

Inclusive Practices Toolkit

The Inclusive Practices Toolkit is designed to support primary, intermediate and secondary schools to engage in a review process. The aim of the review process is to support schools to engage in an ongoing journey towards building inclusive practices for all learners (including learners with extra support needs).

With this toolkit, schools can explore the extent to which a school is creating a safe and caring climate that deters bullying; and the extent to which a school includes all students in all aspects of school life.

The Inclusive Practices Tools include:

• a Student Survey
• a Community Survey
• a Staff Survey (available online only)
• a School Review Profile [SRP] (available online only)
• Inclusive Practices next steps links
• Inclusive Practices action plan template [doc] and
• a range of online survey reports.

All current schools using the W@S toolkit will be informed about minor changes to the Terms of Use (changes are indicated). The changes add Inclusive Practices Tool (IPT) to the current agreement.

The core aspects of the agreement stay the same: the data is owned by each school under NZCER stewardship; data reports can be made available to the Ministry of Education or other users if requested, however these reports are anonymous and school data is grouped.

Relating to Research

Research suggests that approaches that build students’ social and emotional (SE) skills and competencies (such as their ability to relate to others or engage in social problem-solving) are related to improvements across a range of student outcomes. For example, SE learning (SEL) opportunities are associated with increases in students’ social competencies and academic achievement as well as decreases in conduct problems such as bullying (e.g., Payton et al., 2008).

Some key teaching strategies can be effective in building students’ social and emotional skills and ability to resolve conflicts such as bullying behaviour (e.g., see (Farrington & Ttofi, 2009). These include the use of visual resources such as DVDs and videos to prompt discussion, and cooperative learning (when combined with other approaches).

Notes about research sources: Farrington & Ttofi ( 2009) meta-analysis noted that videos and cooperative learning were components of WSA associated with decreases in bullying.

Effective SEL approaches are described using the acronym (SAFE) (Payton et al., 2008).

For further information about Wellbeing@School, read more at the W@S website and tools, or contact us at wellbeing@nzcer.org.nz.