Throughout our Anti-Bullying Week, our pupils, teachers and parents talked about bullying and how we work together to combat this behaviour in our community.
Mrs Pollock, Head of Pastoral Care, explains why we have our Anti-Bullying Week now, long before the national Anti-Bullying Week in November: “Our focus this term from the Westbourne Way is Be Kind, Honest and Truthful. We wanted to start the year with a really strong message to the children about the importance of kindness and to introduce the new children, and remind our children, of all the ways they can get help and support if they need it. Bullying is not accepted at Westbourne House School and we are proud of our kind community. This is something we don’t take for granted and we recognised that we also need to equip all our pupils with the tools and information they need should they experience unkindness or indeed bullying, so they can come to school every day feeling exited, happy and safe.”
At the end of the week, during an assembly on kindness, Mr Barker, headmaster, introduced all the varied initiatives throughout the school that create the support network for pupils by pupils. Pupils heard about the Year 8 Friends, the Year 7 Happy Helpers, the Year 6 Buddies, the Year 4 Playground Pals, the Year 2 Playground buddies and the Kindness Committee. He reminded everyone how kindness costs nothing and helps to create a happy, positive community – and a school that you look forward to going to each day.
We also held a kindness token count up during the assembly. Since the start of term 95 kindness tokens have been handed out to pupils who are kind to others. There was much anticipation as the patrol leaders revealed how many kindness tokens their patrol (house) had collected during the previous two and a half weeks at school. Each patrol had done extremely well and Otters pipped the other patrols to the top spot with 25 kindness tokens.
“It is wonderful that in such a short amount of time there have been so many acts of kindness. We are going to have a doughnut disco at breaktime to celebrate and as a thank you for starting the term with so much kindness.”
Miss Hannan, Kindness Committee
Mrs Oglethorpe, headteacher of Pre-Prep, said: "Here in the younger end of the school, we have explained to the children that the things they say and do have an impact on other people and how important it is to be kind. We talked about trying to be like the Empathetic superhero and to put ourselves into the other person's shoes so we understand how they might feel."
Learning for Life
From Nursery through to Year 8, teachers have talked about the importance of kindness and described bullying as part of the Learning for Life lessons.
For example, all our Year 5-8 pupils discussed our culture at school and how bullying is not accepted and how pupils should feel comfortable at ‘shouting it out’. The children looked at conflict scenarios and how they can be resolved, the dangers of bullying online and they discussed who they can turn to if they have concerns about something happening to them or to others.
Mr Pitman said : “These mornings gave the children practical ways to combat bullying and support others.”
