In January 2023, 7 of our Young Leaders participated in the Diana Award Anti-Bullying training. The Diana Award Anti-Bullying Programme raises awareness of bullying behaviour and assists schools and young people to tackle it across the UK and beyond. This training gave us the skills and confidence to support our fellow pupils and make the school experience better for everyone. Now, we have expanded our group of ABAs to 25.
Several of our ABAs worked with Mr Kitchen and Miss Perry from the leadership team to revamp the ‘reporting unkindness’ and ‘help and support’ forms on the intranet. The forms were re-worded by our ABAs to make them more child/user friendly and then the forms were moved to a more prominent place on the intranet for easier access for pupils.
Every lunchtime, our ABAs are available in classroom R29 for pupils to report unkindness and/or bullying in person if they would like to. We know that some children find it easier talking to someone nearer their own age. Our ABAs take any disclosure very seriously, and only share the information with the safeguarding team.
The next idea was to introduce new ‘post-boxes’ around school for pupils to ‘post’ any concerns and/or questions that they might have. The logo designs were created by our ABAs, and we have put up the post-boxes in prominent places around school for pupils to use. Our ABAs check the postboxes daily and take any reports to the safeguarding office.
An assembly was planned by our ABAs and Mr Penfold to ‘introduce’ the ABAs to the rest of the school. The assembly educated pupils in Years 7, 8, 9 & 10 about who and what our ABAs are, where they can be found, how the new post-boxes work and advertised the new reporting system online. These assemblies were delivered in person during tutor times on week commencing 8th May 2023.
We are currently working on several new projects, including promoting our outdoor classroom. Our outdoor classroom is a space that has been created in our woodland area. It consists of wooden seating, a whiteboard and a teaching platform. We are keen to promote this space in our school as there are many mental and physical health benefits to being outside.
We are also working on a poster project which aims to get a new display board up and running with posters promoting kindness, anti-bullying messages and reminders on who our ABAs are and where & when to find them.
There are lots of new ideas that are being turned into new projects. We will update the website with more information as we go.
