Respectful Relationships

At Brighton Beach Primary School we are committed to implementing Respectful Relationships to further improve the wellbeing of our students. We have integrated Respectful Relationships Education and The Resilience Project to assist with teaching responsibility, resilience, gratitude, empathy and mindfulness. Brighton Beach Primary School has also been selected as a Leading School, guiding local partner schools (primary and secondary) to implement a whole school approach. 

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As well as teaching age-appropriate curriculum, each school will review its practices and policies to ensure it is modelling respectful relationships and gender equality across the school community. 

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Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships

Respectful Relationships is a government initiative that supports schools and early childhood settings to promote and model respect, positive attitudes and behaviours. The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships learning materials have been designed for teachers in primary and secondary schools to develop students’ social, emotional and positive relationship skills. Efforts to promote social and emotional skills and positive gender norms in children and young people has been shown to improve health-related outcomes and subjective well-being. It also reduces antisocial behaviours including engagement in gender-related violence.

 

Each year level covers the same topics at the same time over a two-year period, with the exception of Prep who cover all the topics in one year. The learning resources are age appropriate and adapted to suit the needs of our students. Each lesson is mapped against the Victorian Curriculum. The topics are listed below and these are the same at each year level. The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships program is assessed in the Victorian Curriculum areas of Personal and Social Capability and Health and Physical Education.

 

The classroom Program will focus on 8 key areas: 

Emotional Literacy: This helps students develop the ability to be aware of, understand and use vocabulary about the emotional states of themselves and others with competence.

Personal Strengths: Students develop a vocabulary to help them recognise and understand various strengths and positive qualities in themselves and others. They identify the strengths they admire in others and those they need to draw on to engage with the challenges and opportunities that life presents.

Positive Coping: Students develop language around coping, critically reflect on their coping strategies and extend their repertoire of positive coping strategies.

Problem-solving: Students learn a range of problem-solving techniques that can be applied when confronting personal, social and ethical dilemmas. They engage in applied learning tasks in which they apply their problem-solving skills to be realistic.

Stress management: This teaches students to learn a range of problem-solving skills through applied learning tasks, so that they are able to cope with challenges as they arise.

Help-seeking: Help seeking is a coping strategy that involves seeking technical, instrumental, social or emotional support from other people.

Gender and identity: These are age-appropriate learning activities that assist students to understand and critique the influence of gender norms on attitudes and behaviours.

Positive gender relationships: This teaches students to build positive gender relationships and the importance of acceptance of difference and diversity. 

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The Respectful Relationships whole-school approach recognises that schools are a workplace, a community hub and a place of learning. Everyone involved in our school community deserves to be respected, valued and treated equally. We know that changes in attitudes and behaviours can be achieved when positive attitudes, behaviours and equality are lived across the school community, and when classroom learning is reinforced by what is modelled in our school community.

The best relationships are respectful ones. By working together, we can create real and lasting change and help to address gender inequality and prevent family violence.

   

Resilience Project

We are a proud Resilience Project School. The Resilience Project provides engaging, practical, evidence-based mental health strategies to build resilience and happiness. The Resilience Project has been extraordinarily successful working with schools and sporting teams (including AFL and NRL teams). The Project’s mission is “teaching positive mental health strategies”.

 

There are staggering facts around mental health:

• 1 in 4 adolescents have a mental illness

• 1 in 7 primary schools kids have a mental illness

• 1 in 5 adults will experience mental ill-health throughout the year

• 65% of adolescents do not seek help for mental illness

 

The Resilience Project focus on the key concepts of:

• Mindfulness

• Gratitude

• Empathy

We incorporate aspects of The Resilience Project work into classrooms. Students practise and develop their MINDFULNESS through guided meditation using the Smiling Mind app as well as activities such as mindfulness colouring. GRATITUDE and EMPATHY are also encouraged and explored on an individual, class and school level in a variety of settings and modes. Students have had experience with many strategies to support their own resilience and emotional and mental health. This work has a strong positive impact on learning outcomes as well as emotional health.