Finnish Primary School Teachers’ Experiences of Responding to Bullying and Cyberbullying: Challenges, Strategies, and Support for Newly Qualified Teachers

Abstract

Bullying and cyberbullying among children presents significant challenges for teachers, who play a central role in identifying, interpreting, and responding to incidents. Finland is internationally recognised for its anti-bullying frameworks such as the KiVa Koulu program, but less is known about how primary school teachers in Finland experience responding to bullying and cyberbullying in their everyday practice. This study explored Finnish primary school teachers’ experiences of bullying and cyberbullying, focusing on how they conceptualise these phenomena, the barriers and challenges they face, the strategies they use, and the forms of preparation and support they consider important for newly qualified teachers. The study employed a qualitative exploratory design, collecting data from ten Finnish primary school teachers through semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed a degree of conceptual ambiguity in teachers’ understandings of bullying and cyberbullying. Cyberbullying was reported as less common in primary school contexts, but was widely perceived as more difficult to detect and resolve than face-to-face bullying. The main barriers to bullying resolution included time constraints, emotionally charged interactions with parents, fading anti-bullying programs, and wider social and cultural influences. In practice, the teachers relied primarily on discussion-based, iterative responses involving individual and joint discussions, monitoring, parent involvement and collaboration with school and external professionals. The teachers also emphasised that their own initial teacher educations had provided little meaningful preparation for bullying response, and that competence in this area was developed through professional experience, collegial support, and relational knowledge of students. The study concludes that responding to bullying and cyberbullying in Finnish primary schools is a complex, relational, and context-dependent process shaped by structural conditions within schools and the individual teacher’s professional experience. The findings point to a need for stronger conceptual and practical preparation in current teacher education programs and greater recognition of the collaborative nature of bullying intervention and resolution.