KiVa School Anti-bullying Programme Succeeds in the Netherlands

​KiVa School is a research-based antibullying program that has been developed by the psychology subject and the Center for Learning Research of the University of Turku, Finland. The programme provides comprehensive schools ways to prevent systematic school bullying and handle bullying situations.

The key to the KiVa School approach is heightening awareness in the whole class, and not only the bully and the victim. Targeted real-life assignments make pupils thinking about bullying and what it means to be bullied.

The programme has already shown its effectiveness in Finland and about 2500 schools have registered to use it. Now, the programme is tested abroad.

In the Netherlands, the results are very positive. Introducing KiVa programme to the Netherlands has reduced complaints of bullying by over fifty percent. This has been revealed by the initial results of an evaluation conducted by University of Groningen sociologist René Veenstra among ten thousand pupils at 99 different schools.

Veenstra’s research group was awarded € 1 million in 2010 to test the KiVa method in Dutch schools. The experiment started with 66 ‘KiVa schools’ and 33 schools in a control group.

In the KiVa schools, the percentage of children who said they were being bullied every month or more often dropped from 29% in spring 2012 to 13.5% exactly a year later. In the group of control schools the percentage also dropped, but much less dramatically. The drop is the most dramatic among the worst cases of bullying: a 65% decrease in the group of children that were bullied daily.

Veenstra concludes on the basis of these results that KiVa is working in the Netherlands. According to her, the initial results are great, but more research and investigation is still needed.

The press release of the University of Groningen has been used as a source.

Text: Henna Borisoff
Photograph: Hanna Oksanen