St Gregory's Case Study

Liverpool Archdiocese Secondary Schools’ Partnership Good Practice Case Studies

Overview  

Our school community should be a safe place where there is zero tolerance of bullying The views of our whole community should be sought and valued in our aim of delivering a school community which is ‘One family…inspired to learn.’

Purpose The safeguarding of our students is our first and most important priority. We wanted our students to feel that they knew and understood that bullying, in any form, has no place in our school community.

Our aim was to develop a fully integrated programme of anti-bullying activities which would be driven by our students for our students. Their experiences, ideas and enthusiasms have provided the impetus and energy to develop a programme that has been recognised locally as a model of good practice and by Ofsted as having a positive impact on the well-being of our students. The resulting work has included every member of our community and has succeeded in integrating the work of many key groups in the school: governors, senior leaders, curriculum and pastoral teams, parents and, most importantly, pupils.

What we did  In the first instance it was important for us to ascertain the picture of bullying in our school both in terms of pupils’ understanding of bullying and their experiences of it at SGCHS. Therefore we undertook a student survey to establish what pupils thought bullying was and the percentage of pupils who had experienced any form of bullying at our school. The surveys were tractable to individual pupils enabling us to understand who were our vulnerable pupils and intervene at that point to support individuals. This information gathering process gave us the starting point for our project and also provided us with a set of baseline data from which we have subsequently been able to measure the impact of our work.  Secondly, we formed a pupil focus group to develop our response to the findings. Their first piece of work was to respond to pupils’ understanding of bullying and devise an awareness raising campaign to deal with misconceptions and communicate our school’s values, policies and procedures in relation to bullying. The pupils designed and distributed a range of materials to let their peers know that bullying is unacceptable at SGCHS, that we are a listening school where when you speak to us about bullying you will be supported and solutions will be found  Additionally, pupils decided to develop a weekly anti-bullying meeting to ensure that the high profile of their work is sustained. The group continues to meet each week and discuss with staff any issues relegating to bullying  The work of this team is integrated with the work of our school council and has also resulted

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in the development of a ‘Peace Council’ which focuses on the well-being of all pupils under the headings of Personal Emotional Awareness Council for Equality. This group has most recently delivered a whole school Human Trafficking Awareness day Further emphasis was given to the project by the student led anti- bullying week. This programme of coordinated events and curriculum focus time was called ‘It’s cool to be kind’ and the pupils took the John Lewis penguin campaign as their inspiration for the week. Pupils used a ‘Random Acts of Kindness’ box to ensure that during this week a positive culture of doing and recognising the daily acts of kindness in our community was established.

In order to ensure that we have capacity to ensure that anti bullying remains a key priority for the school, the staff led safeguarding team implemented a bespoke two day training programme for all pupils led by the Princess Diana Anti- Bullying Trust. All pupils in the school were involved but 68 pupils were further trained and recognised as anti-bullying ambassadors. They are recognised by their badges and provide a daily drop-in for their peers and are stationed around school to be that listening ear. Identified pupils who need additional support are also buddied up with an ambassador to help them develop their confidence and resilience.

The school also encouraged the pupils to make a submission to the local authority for their ‘Wise Up’ award and their submission was successful in achieving the only Gold level award in the area.

The most recent piece of work in our on-going project is the follow-up survey of pupils’ experiences of bullying. This has enabled us to measure the impact of our work but was also an ideal vehicle to communicate to all our students what their staff and peers had done in response to their concerns via a ‘You said, we did…’ feedback sheet. It has also provided us with the next stage of our project in terms of the pupils’ suggestion to bring our work into our partner primaries as part of our transition work.

Outcome/Impact  The percentage of pupils who say that they have experienced any form of bullying has dropped from 7.38% to 5% and we aim to reduce this to 0%  The school was awarded the Gold Award for the local authority Wise Up campaign  Ofsted December 2014 recorded that the school as ‘a safe, caring and responsive community’. They note that our students told them ‘bullying is rare and when it occurs it is dealt with quickly’. Importantly also our parents say that ‘their children are happy in school and feel safe’.

Related documents and links: For further information contact Wendy Dolphin – wdolphin@stgregroyshigh.com