Wellbeing and Engagement

Creating Change

Recently a group of young leaders participated in a series of 3 workshops with other local schools that explored how to create more safe, equitable, and inclusive environments. The participating year 5 students were given the opportunity to use their voices to work together on a student-led project to identify an area of need, survey students, create an action plan, and present a proposal.

After exploring a number of known issues in school environments around equity, equality, and respectful relationships the student choose 2 statements to take back to school and explore further...

Please hear from the Young Leaders themselves…………

Hi, my name is Ash this is Ava, Tyler, Nathan, and Charlie.

This year we were chosen to participate in the young leader's program. This involved going to Belgrave South Primary School along with students from 10 other schools, for 3 different workshops. These workshops were called: Let's Learn, Let's take action, and let's Celebrate. This program was based on our 4Rs program and helped us understand the importance of equality and equity.

(Ava) Over the three sessions, we learned: 

- more about gender stereotypes and what they are, for example: girls should wear pink and boys should wear blue

- We also learned about how to stand up to gender stereotypes and how these develop at a young age.

- girls and boys can also be good at anything no matter their gender

(Tyler) In our final session, we shared our presentation in front of 10 other schools. Our presentation went for 5 minutes and it was about gender inequality. This means genders are seen differently both in schools and outside of schools. We decided to come up with two mascots called Ella the equity elephant and Eddie the equality eagle. We would love to create a mural around the school to stop gender inequality. We hope to also use some posters around the school that link to the friendship ninjas based on Ella the Elephant and Eddie the Eagle.

(Nathan) We all had some great highlights through the program such as:

• Ava’s highlight was being able to address this problem to our school and getting to try and fix this problem. 
• Tyler's highlight was getting to hear it and get acknowledged out loud and spoken about on how it could be fixed and how we could help the school and meeting new people.
• My highlight was meeting new people and challenging myself throughout the program
• Ash's highlight was meeting new people and making changes to our school for the better.
•  And Charlie's highlight was creating new characters to represent equity and equality at our school 

(Charlie) We would like to thank the teachers and Mrs Mowat for supporting us during our learning and coming along to these sessions. Also providing us with opportunities to implement these changes in the school and allowing us to have a voice.

Thank you for listening

 Ash, Ava, Tyler, Nathan, and Charlie.

Robyn Mowat,  Assistant Principal | Student Inclusion and Wellbeing

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