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Whole school community

Building a safe and supportive school and preventing bullying

Foster an inclusive school culture and ethos that supports all students and values the diversity of the student, staff and community population including culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability and economic status

Enhance opportunities for connectedness with learning for students at educational risk

• Summary
• Examples

Summary

All young people require a sense of connectedness, belonging and empathy to support academic and social competency within and beyond the classroom. The school plays an important role in realising these outcomes for students at educational risk.

Students at educational risk are those students who are disconnected from the experience of schooling. Their experience of schooling, together with other factors in their lives, makes them vulnerable to not completing their schooling or not achieving to their potential, and it can increase the negative impact of discriminatory behaviours. Schools individually may not overcome the impacts of social and economic disruptions on students' lives. However, schools can increase success and wellbeing by ensuring connectedness between classroom tasks and real world issues, and building directly upon students' actual experiences.

Formal and informal curricula play a major role in ensuring connectedness with learning and community, and in developing understanding and action among all groups to address the construction of advantage and disadvantage.

Schools can promote resilience and success when they work closely with other agencies, and when they enlist the goodwill, skills and resources within their communities for the creation of an inclusive learning community.

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Examples

• A Full Service School approach engages schools, community and health agencies in collaborating to provide more effective services for young people. A high school on the outskirts of a regional city where agencies are limited has recognised domestic violence as a major issue for students, and used this Full Service School approach to create mutually beneficial partnerships with a range of support agencies. The school has actively promoted the concept of interagency collaboration and negotiated to locate agency personnel on site at school.

  Students and their families are encouraged to access the range of personnel and support agencies that work part-time at the school, and student safety and wellbeing initiatives are seen as having a central role in the school's core curriculum areas.

  Schools in action:
  Student resilience and safety

• Bullying, sexual harassment, criticism and isolation by peers and adults play a major role in the decision of pregnant and parenting students to leave school. While flexible responses will assist individual students, whole school awareness raising and change strategies are also vital to challenge existing beliefs and behaviours, understand the links between gender, power and violence, and create an environment where all individuals and groups are respected and included.