---
title: International Day Against Bullying, Building Safer and More Inclusive Learning Environments
description: This piece by TravelEdventures looks at the value of the International Day Against Bullying and how it helps teachers deal with students who experience aggressive behaviour from their peers.
---

[Blog | Travel Edventures](https://info.traveledventures.com)

# [International Day Against Bullying, Building Safer and More Inclusive Learning Environments](https://info.traveledventures.com/international-day-against-bullying-building-safer-and-more-inclusive-learning-environments)

 Written by [Janja Dimtirijević](https://info.traveledventures.com/author/janja-dimtirijević) | November 10, 2026

Most teachers can name the area in their school where it’s unusually quiet. The back of the canteen, the changing rooms or even a group chat they would never be party to. Bullying tends to live where adults aren’t looking and it rarely announces itself. It shows up as a student who stops putting their hand up, or one who suddenly has a stomach ache at the same time every Tuesday.

Each November, UNESCO marks the [International Day Against Violence and Bullying at School,](https://www.unesco.org/en/days/against-school-violence-and-bullying) including cyberbullying. It’s a good excuse to ask an uncomfortable question, what’s happening in our own school that we haven’t noticed? Bullying is more widespread than most adults assume and in a classroom of thirty there’s very likely somebody having to deal with it, possibly more than one person, while the adult at the front of the class has no idea.

## A Day Can Start the Conversation but It Can’t Do the Work

We like awareness days. We also think schools should be a little skeptical of them. A themed assembly in November is easy to organise but just as easy to forget by December. What the research states is fairly consistent. Approaches involving an entire school along with shared rules, trained staff and responses that don’t just depend on which teacher happens to be on duty, tend to do more than one-off events or punishing individuals. A student who is sanctioned and then sent back into the same social setting will usually find a quieter way to carry on their campaign of harassment!

What seems to matter most is the everyday response of adults and what ordinary students feel allowed to do. Three things are worth getting right.

The first is the small stuff! Nobody misses a punch. What gets missed is the exclusion, the running joke that always lands on the same person, the “accidental” removal from a group chat and that is exactly where it starts. Calling it out early and calmly, without a speech, tells the whole room what’s normal here.

The second is people watching. Most students are neither bullying nor being bullied yet they know exactly what’s going on. If the only options they can imagine are heroic interventions or silence, they choose silence. It helps to teach the smaller moves; sit next to the person who got left out, message them afterwards, tell a teacher without it being treated as telling tales and make reporting boring. Students speak up when they know what happens next and trust it won’t make things worse.

The third is everything that happens after the school day. Cyberbullying follows young people home and a ban on phones in class does nothing for a group chat at eleven at night. Talking about it plainly does, for example, how to take a screenshot, how to report it, what to do when you see it happening to a friend.

Underneath all three sits the question of who is most exposed? Students who stand out from the majority, through language, background, ability, family income or identity are targeted more often. That’s why we see anti-bullying work and inclusion work as one job. Run them as separate projects and each ends up weaker.

## What Looking Abroad Adds

This is where international education comes in and it’s worth being precise about what we mean. Inclusion and diversity are priorities of Erasmus+ and safeguarding is part of its quality standards. A school applying for mobility funding has to think about how every participant, including those with fewer opportunities, will be supported and kept safe. That is useful pressure. It makes schools write down things they would otherwise leave to chance.

For teachers, a job shadowing week or a structured course abroad gives access to something no handbook does; watching another school work. How does a school in another country runs peer mediation? What does a student council look like when its decisions actually count? What does a teacher do in the first minute after an argument breaks out at break-time? Teachers rarely come home with a theory, they come home with something small they can use, such as a way to open a difficult class discussion, a script for a restorative conversation, or a routine for the first five minutes of a lesson.

For students the effect is different. Spend two weeks on a work placement in a new country, working in your second or third language and you find out what it is to be the newcomer. You miss half of what’s said at lunch. You laugh a beat late at a joke. You hope someone will pull out a chair. Some students bring that feeling home and start noticing the new kid in their own class. It isn’t automatic though and it depends a great deal on how the trip is prepared and talked through afterwards.

That part is in the school’s hands. Pre-departure meetings are a good moment to agree how the group will treat each other, what to do if someone feels left out and who to go to if something feels off, whether at the workplace, at the accommodation or documented on the group chat. The students who most need support are often the last to ask for it. A short, honest debrief afterwards (what was hard, who helped, what you would want your own school to do differently) can feed straight back into the classroom.

## Worth Asking at Your Next Staff Meeting

If you only have ten minutes this November, a few questions are enough to start with, as follows:

- If a student was being left out right now, who would notice first?
- Do students know how to report something and do they believe anything will happen if they do?
- How do we welcome newcomers and students with fewer opportunities, in practice rather than in the school’s policy?
- What could our teachers pick up from watching how another school in Europe handles bullying?

Safer classrooms get built through small, repeated habits far more than through one good day in November. If your school is thinking about how international projects could support inclusion and wellbeing, we are happy to talk it through. [Get in touch with our team here.](https://www.traveledventures.com/contact/)

 

 

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