Meanwhile, a woman this week was sentenced to 100 hours of community service in the Rotorua District Court for assaulting two teenage girls who she believed was making her 16-year-old daughter's life "a misery".
Westbrook School principal Colin Watkins said he couldn't comment on how New Zealand compared with other countries but agreed bullying was a common source of youth suicide, depression and mental illness.
"Bullying is second only to losing one or both parents as being the most traumatic things a child can experience. In saying that, I'm not convinced the problem is getting worse.
While I don't want to play it down, it is important we are not confusing bullying with one-off events. If two children have an argument about who owns a pen, that is not bullying, but often the child will then go home and tell their parents they were bullied.
"This is where we have seen the rise in 'helicopter parents'. Parents who rush to their child's defence, naively believing everything their child has told them."
Mr Watkins said with this, children were becoming less resilient.
"While I wouldn't want a child to ever feel isolated, alone and lost if they were on the receiving end of on-going bullying, we also need to teach our children to be resilient. There will always be disagreements in life and we need to raise our children to distinguish between an argument and ongoing abuse."
John Paul College principal Patrick Walsh, who was chairman of the Ministry of Education's Cyber Bullying Workforce, said he did not think schoolyard bullying was getting worse but believed cyber bullying was on the rise.
"It is disappointing that we do have a poor record of bullying and it's a shame a lot of that sits on the shoulders of schools when in reality, students don't learn to be violent and anti-social at school, they learn that kind of behaviour from home.
"The other rising problem is less and less of the actual bullying is happening at school where teachers, deans and counsellors can deal with it there and then - it is happening over the internet on social media sites that children are using completely unsupervised.
"We've dealt with cyber bullying issues where we've shown parents their child's social media accounts and the parents are horrified at what was going on because they had no idea."
Louise Green from the New Zealand Educational Institute said: "Children have the right to an education, that nurtures their full potential and is free from bullying and harassment."
Education Minister Hekia Parata said the longstanding issue of bullying "remains an ugly and unwanted presence in our schools, but I am optimistic for the future".
A lot of work had been done since the study was carried out to address the issue of bullying in schools, she said, such as new guidelines on cyberbullying.
