Australia now has two anti-bullying frameworks with near identical names, one for NSW and one for the whole country, plus an eSafety toolkit that predates both. Here is how they relate.
Around one in four Australian students in Years 4 to 9 are bullied regularly, and most of it has moved online. The eSafety Commissioner recorded 2,978 valid cyberbullying complaints involving children in 2024, up from 536 in 2019, a rise of about 455 per cent in five years. Only around one in three bullied students tell a teacher. Both frameworks below were built in response.
Released by NESA in December 2025, this is a NSW State Policy, developed by Emeritus Professor Donna Cross OAM in consultation with all three school sectors. It sets out four components, Preventing, Responding, Partnering and Implementing, and from 2027 every NSW registered school must have policies aligned to NSW Anti-Bullying framework and published on the school website. NESA will be running spot checks from Term 1. For the full breakdown of each component and a school readiness checklist, see NSW Anti-Bullying Framework and how Assure can help.
The National Framework is the Commonwealth level policy, covering every state and territory. It grew out of the Anti-Bullying Rapid Review, an independent review that consulted over 1,700 submissions and reported in October 2025. Education Ministers agreed an Implementation Plan in February 2026, reframing the review's proposed national standard as the National Framework. It sets shared expectations, so a student's experience does not depend on which state they are in, backed by a 10-million-dollar investment including the Let's Stop Bullying campaign, which launched in August 2026.
Both frameworks expect schools to begin responding to a reported or observed incident within two school days, whether that is contacting parents, taking immediate safety steps, or offering initial wellbeing support. The matter does not need to be resolved in two days, but action must start.
Scope and origin, not substance. NSW released its Framework two months before Education Ministers agreed the national Implementation Plan. NESA designed the NSW Framework with the national work in mind, so NSW schools meeting their state obligations should also be on track nationally. Schools outside NSW answer to the National Framework directly, as their own state or territory translates it into local policy through 2026. Both land on the same Term 1, 2027 deadline for public, aligned policies.
The eSafety Toolkit for Schools is older and narrower, last updated in 2022 and focused specifically on online safety rather than bullying broadly. Its four elements, Prepare, Engage, Educate and Respond, map closely onto the two frameworks' components. It is not a compliance requirement like the frameworks are, but an implementation resource, something schools can draw on to build the online safety piece of a policy that already needs to exist.
Meeting all of this in practice, not just on paper, means having visibility into where bullying happens now: shared documents, group chats and collaboration tools, not just the playground. Saasyan Assure extends monitoring into Teams, Outlook, Google Chat, Gmail, Docs and Drive, with role-based alerts and audit trails that support the two-day response window and the record-keeping both frameworks require. Read more in NSW Anti-Bullying Framework and how Assure can help.
National Framework for Addressing Bullying in Australian Schools
Bullying is harder to spot than you think, Minister for Education Jason Clare
NSW Anti-Bullying Framework and how Assure can help, Saasyan