Making lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people visible
Tackling Homo/transphobia
Schools OUT! can offer trainers for the following services with our link to Chrysalis www.thechrysalisteam.co.uk Tel: 0207 635 0476
Inset
Staff need to be aware of the effects of homo/transphobia on:
All pupils
All staff
All parents
All governors
Particularly
LGBT pupils
LGBT staff
LGBT parents
LGBT governors
Our inset training will:
Raise awareness of the issues of LGBT people
Inform staff of their legal duties tackling homo/transphobia
Inform staff of the reality and effects of homo/transphobia on LGBT young people
Introduce methods of dealing with the derogatory use of gay and slang terms for lesbians and gays.
Enable staff to appropriately deal with students, staff and parents coming out
Enable staff to be inclusive of appropriate LGBT people and issues in their curriculum.
Enable SLG to produce effective policies and practices that meet with the requirements of the Children Act 1989; The DfEE Draft Sex and Relationship Guidance, 2000; The Local Government Act, 2000; The Learning and Skills Act, 2000; The Sexual Orientation Discrimination Regulations, 2003 as they apply to LGBT people.
We prefer to work with all members of staff: teachers, governors, admin, support, welfare, catering and maintenance staff as bullying occurs in many places in the school and a confident, consistent approach is vital in tackling all forms of bullying especially homo/transphobia.
The session comprises: factual input, an experiential exercise and the use of case studies to explore good practice.
Ideally the course will run as a full half day session.
Policies
We can help negotiate your equal opportunity and anti bullying policies so that they will support and enable good practice. See http://www.schools-out.org.uk/policy and law for model policies endorsed by all the teaching unions.
Classroom Workshops
Pupils need to be aware of the effect of prejudice, stereotyping and negative discrimination.
Pupils need to be enabled to understand the effects of their behaviour and their responsibility in preventing all forms of bullying including homo/transphobia.
The workshop comprises: an exploration of hate crime in general and homo/transphobia in particular utilising the Allports model of discrimination and the story of Darren Steele; along with stories of success of young people tackling homophobic bullying school, with written work of various kinds from simple multiple choice to letters, essays and plays.
The lesson can be delivered to pupils from year 7-13.
It will be adjusted according to age of pupils.
The minimum time is an hour and we can work effectively with secondary pupils for 2 hours.
Conferences
We are skilled at supporting the organisation of anti homo/transphobic conferences. These can be borough wide or a cluster of schools. We can provide keynote speakers and workshop/seminar leaders/facilitators. All our trainers are very experienced teachers and/or youth workers.
Sue Sanders was one of the panel members at the recent DFES conferences launching their anti bullying charter. School's Out was a major participant at all nine.
Our experience has taught us that it is wise to provide inset for all staff initially to enable a confident and knowledgeable approach that can deal with the issues effectively and consistently before any new work is done with pupils.
Cost
This will depend upon the range of work you require from us.
There are various channels that might support your funding:
The police;
Your local Education Authority;
The Community Safety Department of your local council.
Inset
Our new model is cost effective and enables the SMT to own the work. We come in and train the SMT on specific case studies and start an action plan for the school.We then present a seminar to the entire staff giving them facts and figures on homophobia, the business, moral and case for dealing with LGBT issues and homophobia, then have workshops on the case studies and action plans run by the SMT, after the workshops we come back together and answer any questions that have been raised and plot the initial action plan for the school.
This means that we have come to the school at least twice once to train the SMT and then the second time to deliver the main inset and support the workshops, some schools then have us back to help the process through using an Equality Impact Assessment tool we have developed. The advantage of this process is that the senior team have the chance to mull through the issues before they work with the staff and a proper action plan is devised plotting what individuals, subject areas and the senior team need to do to make an effective measurable difference.
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