Are Our Schools Safe for Children: Presentation of a Study by the UCU Center for Child Dignity

The UCU Center for Child Dignity, together with the Fama Research Agency, with the support of the Lviv Education Department, conducted the study "Safe School for Children" (2024).

We wanted to find out what influences children's sense of safety in educational institutions, and whether children, parents, and teachers understand what safety at school is in the same way. On June 18, the results of the study were presented at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Center.

The study involved 2000 students and 800 parents. Interviews were conducted with teachers of Lviv community schools. The project has developed a comprehensive methodology for assessing the level of safety in Ukrainian schools. It will be scaled up to other communities in Ukraine and will facilitate the implementation of effective safety measures that will work in the best interests of the child.

Khrystyna Shabat, head of UCU's Center for Child Dignity, shared: "We believe that the results obtained and the mechanism for measuring the sense of safety that we will receive after this study will be useful for other communities and will help build truly effective systems for the prevention of violence against children that will work in the best interests of the child and in a participatory approach."

The study found that children's perception of school safety is about friendships, parents' perception is about protection from external threats, and teachers and school administrators associate safety with preventing psychological threats, maintaining health, and working with parents to effectively educate children.

Mariana Malachivska-Danchak, founder and director of the Fama Research Agency, said: "We sincerely hope that the solution we have developed will help educational managers better understand the situation and thus make informed decisions to make our children feel more comfortable and safe."

Among other interesting findings of the study:

• 68% of surveyed students in Lviv said that friendly relationships with teachers and classmates, the absence of bullying, and having friends have the greatest impact on their sense of school safety.
• 61% of surveyed students said they have a safe adult at school. The class teacher is the most trusted by students: 69% of respondents would turn to him/her in case of being beaten or bullied by others. However, 21% of children feel anxious in the principal's office, and 7% said they constantly feel anxious during the learning process - in fact, every tenth student.
• 16% of students said that every day they observed teachers treating some students much better than others. One out of 10 students said that on a daily basis, teachers did not believe when a student told the truth.
• 59% of students believe that a specially trained security teacher would be more helpful for school peace than a police officer.
• Of all the people, strangers on school grounds cause the most anxiety among children: one in five students say they feel this way. 17% said that sometimes strangers can get into the school.

The full text of the study is available here.