All kinds of approaches have been tried to stop the school bully - mild admonishment, severe reprimand, detention, suspension, even expulsion. Often, none of them are enough to prevent bullies from continuing to do damage to their victims.

The various approaches by individual schools are paralleled by a range of approaches at State level. The Department of Education have guidelines, teacher unions has issued policy papers, but little attention has been paid to encouraging the children themselves to solve the problem.

If anyone knows about the often brutal rules of the playground, it is children.

Now a team at Trinity College Dublin's Anti-Bullying Centre are suggesting just that. L∅an McGuire and her colleagues are looking at a form of "peer mediation" and they hope in the long term that the Department of Education may introduce it to schools, at least at post-primary level.

How does it work? McGuire says the idea is relatively simple. A school allows a number of its own pupils to act as peer mediators between fellow pupils when incidents of bullying arise.

The process takes places in a a private room where the mediators bring the parties - or "disputants" - and facilitate them in solving their differences.

The solutions might not always be perfect, but are often practical.

"If one person feels another pupil is picking on him or her and the other one denies this, one way around that would be for them to agree to ignore each other in the future," she says.

She describes the system as an "extra rung" to existing precautions against bullying. If things get very serious or if the alleged bully shows no sign of curbing the behaviour, then the mediators are told to alert the teachers. Throughout the process, the mediators write down what they see and hear, in case it is relevant later.

The system is already proving successful in New Zealand, the US and parts of Britain. A similar system has been tried - on a pilot basis - in St Andrew's College in Booterstown, Co Dublin, says McGuire.

The peer mediators are trained in "conflict resolution", she says, and look in detail at what is causing the problem between the two.

She claims that often when a bully is confronted, in a one-on-one situation, with the hurt he or she is imposing on the other child, it brings about a change in behaviour.

"It has to be stressed that it is not a cure always, but sometimes it can help the two pupils to come to a mutual understanding. It tries to stop small problems becoming big problems."

For the programme to work, teachers and parents need to be as familiar with it as the pupils.

The meeting between the two pupils should be free of bad language and should seek to strip away the emotional layers.

"In schools where it has been tried, disruption and violence levels have fallen, while performance levels have risen," she says.

But how does the system handle bullies when they come in groups?

"Well invariably there is always a leader, the trick is to deal with that person. Most of the time people who hang around with the bully are doing so because they are afraid, too," she says.

Many parents would be anxious about fellow pupils dealing with bullying, rather than adults, such as the school authorities.

"Well, this doesn't undermine the traditional role of the teachers and principal; we see it as augmenting it. The philosophy at the heart of it is that children are more capable than we give them credit for."

She concedes it could be a few years before we see it in schools on a permanent basis.

One of the biggest problems is a legal one. Teachers act in loco parentis in schools and have a duty of care to their charges. If children themselves are delegated to deal with bullying problems, would that cut across the role of teachers?

This question will have to be answered.

McGuire says the issue of confidentiality also poses problems. For example, how much should a mediator tell a teacher, if the victim originally went to the mediator on a strictly confidential basis?

While there are no shortage of questions about the idea, it has one advantage over the more traditional responses.

It has not really been tried before in Irish schools.