The Effectiveness of Whole-School Antibullying Programs: A Synthesis of Evaluation Research

Abstract

Bullying is a serious problem in schools, and school authorities need effective solutions to resolve this problem. There is growing interest in the whole-school approach to bullying. Whole-school programs have multiple components that operate simultaneously at different levels in the school community. This article synthesizes the existing evaluation research on whole-school programs to determine the overall effectiveness of this approach. The majority of programs evaluated to date have yielded nonsignificant outcomes on measures of self-reported victimization and bullying, and only a small number have yielded positive outcomes. On the whole, programs in which implementation was systematically monitored tended to be more effective than programs without any monitoring.