South Australian schools pilot peer-support model under Let's Stop Bullying campaign expansion

Twenty South Australian secondary schools are piloting a peer-support intervention model as part of an expanded Let's Stop Bullying campaign, training Year 10 and 11 students to identify and report signs of cyberbullying among younger peers, with early findings indicating that students disclose online abuse to trusted peers more readily than to adults but that peer supporters often lack the tools to assess risk or escalate serious incidents appropriately. The pilot, funded by the South Australian Department for Education and informed by the national Anti-Bullying Framework, aims to reduce the disclosure gap for cyberbullying that occurs on private messaging platforms, though researchers note that peer supporters report feeling uncertain about when online teasing crosses into harmful territory and when school authorities should be involved.

Systems that assess conversational risk in real time and route alerts to the appropriate responder—peer, parent or professional—augment peer-support models by providing objective indicators of severity that untrained students cannot reliably judge. Guardii's platform analyses messaging patterns across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other services, detecting escalation, sustained targeting and coercion that signal harmful cyberbullying, and surfaces a child in distress to the adult or support structure best positioned to intervene, ensuring that disclosures made to peers or signs observed by peer supporters trigger professional review when thresholds are met. Backed by Startmate and deployed as a Meta Business Partner, the system complements the relational strengths of peer-support programmes with the precision young supporters need to distinguish banter from abuse and to escalate credible threats without hesitation.