Fulfilling potential
Safe, confident and resilient John Lewis describes the educational benefits of the school’s personal safety programme At St Edward’s Cheltenham we have long believed that teaching our students practical life-enhancing skills is essential for their positive overall development and contributes to a successful academic learning environment. Our goal has always been to build resilient, happy, successful students who can go out into the world feeling confident and able to make safe decisions, no matter what situation they may find themselves dealing with. So, when in early in 2018 we had the opportunity to review and assess a new Personal Safety Programme from Streetwise365, we were excited to see how this could help us to work with our students. Streetwise365 believe that education providers need to take the lead in teaching students how to be safe. Their programme helps to achieve this via a series of interactive workshops and an online resource packed with content designed to educate secondary students on how to make safe decisions and stay safe in everyday life situations. Working closely with the Streetwise365 team, we were able to discuss our specific needs with regards to the subject of student personal safety and how we could introduce this training into our already busy school timetable. The overall objective was to integrate the programme into all Year groups
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Autumn 2019
as seamlessly and as quickly as possible. We began with an initial programme of two-hour workshops, supported through the use of the online resource material, with the option to add additional workshops as and when required in the future. The Streetwise365 programme revolves around the simple principle of ‘awareness and understanding’, giving students the life skills to be aware of potential dangers in everyday situations. This assists them in making sensible and safe decisions, allowing them to act appropriately to move themselves to safety. Students and staff have attended the workshops together, working through real life scenarios. Through this they have learnt to develop the skills required to recognise potential dangers, practised defusing techniques and learnt basic defence skills to protect themselves if required to do so. An unexpected bonus has been that the staff have also found the programme very rewarding, proving that personal safety is a skill required by all ages. We found that the programme fits perfectly within our existing PSHE initiative, supporting the students and enabling them to improve the individual decisions they may make to keep themselves safe. We particularly liked the fact that the main emphasis of the programme is about detecting potential
