I feel safe in my school

The educational material “I feel safe in my school” was created in 2007-2008.

After its pilot implementation, it was evaluated and applied to a total of 1280 students by 43 teachers from 20 schools in eastern Thessaloniki. Since then, it has been a basic educational material of ELPIDA and is continuously applied every year in several schools.

The main purpose of the educational material is the prevention of violence – aggression and the promotion of safety at school. The individual objectives are:

understanding of the concept of violence and its forms of expression,
recognising and understanding difficult emotions and learning how to manage them,
developing students’ personal and social skills and linking them to tackling violence,
fostering a climate of cooperation in the classroom and improving existing interpersonal relationships.

It consists of 10 two-hour experiential sessions, the implementation of which is based on the social and personal skills model that aims to shape behaviours that promote psychosocial health. It makes use of experiential learning, which enables students to become actively involved in the acquisition of knowledge, to enhance their learning capacity, to become more responsible so as to form a shared experience that can lead to actions towards social changes in the school environment.

Programme structure

Implementation of an introductory training seminar (2 days, 11 hours) for teachers, aiming at the understanding of basic concepts of the programme on the one hand and familiarisation with experiential learning techniques on the other hand.
Supervision team for teachers, coordinated by staff of the “ELPIDA” Prevention Centre. The aim of this team will be to support teachers in the implementation of the educational material to students. The duration of each meeting will be 2 hours, depending on the number of participants. The total number of supervisory meetings will be determined with each group.
Parallel application of the educational material of the programme by the teachers to the students (10 two-hour sessions).

Participants will receive a certificate of participation after the end of the seminar and the implementation of the programme to the students.

Experiences from the implementation of the programme

We started the programme with the hope that something very positive would come out at the end. Something beneficial that, and us as educators, will help us to handle situations of violence that we face every day among our students and help our students to realize what it is that leads them to violence and to handle it.

The benefits are many and significant. Both for me, on a personal level, and for the school, children and teachers. It has been a journey of difficulties, challenges, small and great joys that has finally led to the much desired goal: the creation of a truly safer school.

Children learned to speak up more when something is bothering them, to classmates, teachers, parents. Verbal violence has been greatly reduced, they have learned to look at the person next to them, to cooperate better when asked, to apologize, to admit that they are to blame, to their fair share... I think it was a unique gift to ourselves.