The EU’s Action Plan Against Cyberbullying: What It Says, and What Your School Can Use Now

Most schools handling a cyberbullying incident are working from their own policy and whatever the platform’s reporting form allows. Far fewer know that the European Commission has an action plan devoted specifically to cyberbullying, or that it comes with a free toolkit sorted by country, language and reader.

What the action plan sets out

The action plan is organised around three pillars: a coordinated EU approach to protection, prevention and awareness, and reporting and support.

Read as a school document, the third pillar is the one that stands out. Most anti-bullying policies are strong on prevention — an assembly, a poster campaign, a lesson in the pastoral slot — and thin on what happens in the hours after a child reports something. The action plan treats reporting and support as its own body of work rather than the tail end of prevention.

The measure that reaches students directly

One commitment is concrete enough to plan around. The Commission says it will support the implementation of an online safety app across all member states, enabling children and young people to easily report cyberbullying, store and submit evidence, and receive tailored assistance.

The evidence clause is the part worth noticing. Schools lose cases because screenshots were never taken, were taken badly, or the account was deleted before anyone recorded anything. An app that stores and submits evidence changes what a school can act on. There’s no rollout date on the page, so this is a commitment rather than a service you can use next term — but it tells you where this is heading.

What the #NotOnOurFeed campaign added

Better Internet for Kids ran the #NotOnOurFeed campaign on behalf of the Commission in August and September 2026, built on the same three pillars.

It also covered something most school policies haven’t caught up with: emerging challenges, including AI-related abuse. Generated images, cloned voices and edited video simply aren’t in the vocabulary of a policy written before 2024. Three webinars from the campaign were recorded and are still on the campaign page. One of them is called “When online bullying enters the classroom”.

The toolkit outlasts the campaign

The campaign is over. Its toolkit isn’t, and that’s the part to keep.

It gathers existing resources on cyberbullying, identified by the network of Safer Internet Centres across Europe. It’s free, it filters by country and language, and it’s sorted by who’s reading: someone being targeted, someone watching it happen, and the adults around them — parents, guardians, teachers and educators.

That third grouping is rarer than it sounds. Most cyberbullying material is written either for children or for policymakers. Every member state also has a Safer Internet Centre giving free advice, and locating your own country’s takes about a minute.

What a school can do with it

None of this needs a budget or a project application:

• Record your national contact. Find your country’s Safer Internet Centre and write its details into your anti-bullying policy, so the contact exists before someone needs it.
• Read your policy against the three pillars. Ask whether your reporting and support side is as developed as your prevention side, or whether it amounts to one sentence about telling a form tutor.
• Check for the AI gap. See whether your policy says anything about generated images or cloned voices. If it doesn’t, the toolkit is where the material is, and our article on deepfakes of students sets out where EU law stands.

The action plan gives you a structure to check your policy against. The toolkit gives you something to work from.

If cyberbullying is a gap your staff want to work on properly rather than in a single training day, our Cyber Bullying course is built around these same three pillars and ends with a written intervention protocol for your school. Browse it alongside our other structured courses, or start a registration once you know which activity fits.