When Education Minister Jason Clare announced the Anti-Bullying Rapid Review in early 2025, he spoke with the gravity such tragedies demand.

The appointment of respected experts, the language of “rapid response”, and the promise of a national standard sounded decisive and humane.

But anyone who has spent a lifetime in schools knows the ritual. Each time a child’s death or a media storm exposes the brutality of bullying, governments respond with urgency, consultants and the familiar refrain that “we must do better". And then nothing fundamental changes. Two decades of policies, frameworks and reviews have failed to shift the numbers. In some areas, bullying is worse.

The new review’s purpose seems virtuous enough, to “examine what is working and what needs strengthening” and to advise ministers on a national framework. Yet, its design ensures the outcome before it begins. It restricts inquiry to what happens within schools and explicitly rules that broader forces, social media, family stress, poverty and inequality lie beyond scope.

That single phrase, “beyond scope”, has become the moral firewall of government. It converts human pain into administrative order. Once grief is processed into a set of Terms of Reference, compassion becomes a deliverable and the state is safe again.

The Anti-Bullying Rapid Review is not a turning point; it is another episode in a long bureaucratic series: Bullying – No Way! (2000), the National Safe Schools Framework (2003, revised 2011) and the NSW Anti-Bullying Strategy (2017). All declared bullying “unacceptable”. All promised whole-school approaches, online resources and teacher training. All left the problem essentially untouched.

Despite the policy noise, Australia remains near the top of OECD tables for school bullying. PISA 2018 found that almost one in three students reported being bullied at least a few times each month, far above the OECD average. Complaints to the eSafety commissioner rise each year. The Queensland Audit Office recently reported more than 75,000 bullying incidents in state schools in a single year, and a 40% rise in cyberbullying over the last decade.

So the question is not what we still don’t know, but why we refuse to act on what we do. The answer lies in the managerial logic that has replaced educational leadership.

Neoliberal bureaucracy governs through process, not purpose. It measures compassion, it audits care, it translates moral failure into key-performance indicators. In this world, a crisis demands not reflection but an “action plan”. A child’s death demands a “framework for consistency”.

Every new review follows the same choreography:

1. Public empathy (“we must do better”).
2. Consultation and report writing.
3. The launch of a “new standard".
4. A cycle of measurement and compliance.
5. The next tragedy and the next review.

The pattern protects ministers from blame and gives the appearance of motion, while the machinery of harm remains untouched. Teachers, principals and school leaders become the face of the problem and the first targets of its failure.

Each layer of reform adds another administrative burden. Teachers must report, record, follow up, educate, counsel and document. They are required to deliver social healing through procedural adherence. When bullying persists, the implicit message is that they have failed to apply the framework correctly.

The emotional cost is enormous. Many teachers now experience the very dynamics of bullying inside their own workplaces, public shaming, top-down control and impossible expectations. Departments urge teachers to build “safe, supportive cultures” while their own organisational cultures too often model fear and silence. It is the most corrosive hypocrisy in public life: demanding relational safety from a system that cannot provide it.

Bullying is not a behavioural quirk of adolescence. It is a learned relational strategy, a way of managing unbearable inner states through control of others. It is the social expression of fear and shame.

Children learn bullying long before they arrive at school. They learn it in families where affection is conditional, in households where anger or neglect rules the atmosphere, in peer cultures and media worlds that reward ridicule. They learn that domination brings safety and that humiliation is contagious.

Neuroscience tells us how deeply this learning embeds. Early exposure to unpredictability or violence sensitises the stress response system. The brain learns to equate control with survival. Aggression becomes a conditioned reflex. By the time these children enter school, their neural wiring has rehearsed the lesson thousands of times: hurt or be hurt.

To call that behaviour “misconduct” is to misunderstand it. Bullying is remembered pain, replayed.

When departments define bullying as a series of incidents to be managed, they are treating a relational wound as an administrative problem. Checklists and escalation pathways cannot rewrite emotional memory. Nor can they provide what the child has never known, predictable safety and respect.

Programs may raise awareness or momentarily deter, but they rarely transform. Transformation happens only when a new environment teaches the brain that power and safety no longer require domination. That is the true work of the classroom.

A functional classroom does what policy cannot: it provides the conditions for re-learning. Predictability replaces chaos. Fairness replaces arbitrary authority. Humour and warmth signal belonging. Accountability is delivered without humiliation. Here, the child learns that authority can protect rather than injure, that conflict can be resolved without winners and losers.

This structured, relational environment is not soft, it is disciplined care. It asks more of the teacher than of the student: to remain calm when provoked, to hold boundaries with dignity, to understand that behind every act of aggression lies a child who has never known safety.

That work cannot be standardised. It depends on professional judgment, empathy and human steadiness, qualities that bureaucracy cannot measure, but schools cannot survive without.

The contradiction is glaring. Departments preach emotional safety, yet run on fear and compliance. Thousands of public-sector staff each year report bullying, intimidation and unreasonable management action. Teachers disciplined for speaking out about violence or workloads know this firsthand. When the system models coercion, it teaches the same lesson the bully has already learned: power protects.

Until the structures of education themselves embody fairness and psychological safety, anti-bullying policies will remain theatre. A department that humiliates its own employees cannot teach children dignity.

If governments were serious about reducing bullying, they would start where it begins, in the environments that teach it.

1. Support early relationships.
2. Protect teachers.
3. Invest in professional trust.
4. Challenge the culture of humiliation.

The opposite of bullying is not compliance, but connection. It cannot be mandated by ministerial decree or captured in a data dashboard. It grows in environments where people are respected, boundaries are clear and mistakes are met with guidance rather than shame.

A genuine national standard would ask one question of every school and every education office: Do the people here feel safe enough to learn?

If the answer is no, no number of policies will help.

Bullying persists not because we lack knowledge but because our governing structures refuse to learn. Each new review manages emotion rather than confronting the social conditions that breed cruelty. It asks teachers to absorb the pain of the world and then blames them when the world seeps back into their classrooms.

A humane education system would begin by applying its own lessons inward, by modelling the safety, respect and predictability it demands of teachers and students alike. Until that happens, the Anti-Bullying Rapid Review will join a long line of well-intentioned documents filed neatly in departmental archives: a record not of reform, but of avoidance.

Real change will come only when governments stop managing shame and start listening to those who live with it, in classrooms, not conference rooms.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.