Wellbeing

This year, we introduced the initiative 'The Stand Up Project' (SUP) to prevent bullying and build a strong culture of respect among the whole school community here at Burwood East Primary School.

The thing that stood out to us when we were exploring programs that we could use, was the strong focus on student voice and agency - SUP is student led.

Dr. Zach Greig from the Stand Up Project presented a workshop to the whole Year 5 cohort. He then asked for volunteers to be Stand Up Project Leaders. The leaders had an additional session with Zach to assist them to plan workshops to present to students at BEPS.

Not only did our Year 5 leaders present workshops for the Year 3 and Year 4 cohorts, they also presented to parents and co-facilitated a staff professional learning session for the teachers. The feedback from each session was overwhelmingly positive.

It has been great to see the language of SUP and the strategies to empower students, being applied across the whole school community. Our students are beginning to say things like “I’m having a friendship fire, can you please help me?” and identifying the difference between a friendship fire, mean on purpose and bullying (repeated, targeted, mean on purpose behaviour).