Caerleon Lodge Hill Primary
Caerleon Lodge Hill Primary School are based in Caerleon, Newport. They presented their work on revamping their anti-bullying strategy to the Anti-Bullying Alliance Wales Steering Group in 2022.
They began by incorporating their work on anti-bullying into the School Development Plan and implementing changes to protocols and daily practice. The main noticeable change in the school’s practice was the vocabulary used when referring to anti-bullying, for example ‘target’ and ‘perpetrator’ have replaced ‘victim’ and ‘bully’. Their focus gathered momentum, after an introduction to the anti-bullying charity Kidscape, where the school accessed training and resources.
Caerleon Lodge Hill rewrote their anti-bullying policy, renaming it the Rights, Respect, Equality Policy. In it, they put an emphasis on preventing incidents of bullying, by understanding the reasoning behind certain behaviours and embraced the need to give support to all parties involved in incidents. Kidscape’s ten-point action was used to facilitate the rewriting of the policy and the policy had input from school staff and the Pupil Leadership Team. Their action plan on the policy is reviewed and updated termly.
Rights, Respect, Equality staff lead and a governor lead roles were appointed in order to co-ordinate, spearhead and drive forward the vision that was emerging and all governors have been invited to attending RRE training before the end of the 2021-22 academic year.
The Pupil Leadership Team meet weekly with the head teacher and RRE staff lead to share ideas and make suggestions on addressing concerns raised by other pupils. The team also devise questions to use in a biannual RRE survey for all school pupils, the results of which are used to plan and focus for the term ahead.
Following incidents of bullying, the school adopt varied strategies to help rebuild confidence, self-esteem and relationships, for example:
- Restorative justice sessions are held between the pupils involved in an incident
- ELSA sessions are arranged for the pupils involved to allow them time to talk to someone about their feelings
- SEAL sessions are utilised to help build friendships and social skills.
Peer Mentoring
The school’s teaching staff are also in the process of establishing a Peer Mentoring Programme following training from Kidscape.
Year 4 and 5 pupils will buddy up with younger pupils who need support with social skills and building friendships and model expected behaviour.
A steering group of staff members will drive forward the programme and an action plan has also been created to assess, review and improve as they move through the process.
Kidscape www.kidscape.org.uk
Anti-bullying Alliance www.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk