The Building Peaceful Schools Programme works to improve school climate through interventions with school leaders, teachers, learners and parents to ‘do discipline differently’ and make schools into places of safety and peace where learning can happen more effectively.
Key aspects of this work include: a set of 17 Workshops for Teachers in schools covering a range of topics; a Peer Mediation programme for learners; a Parental Engagement programme to encourage peaceful parent-child relationships; Leading Restorative Justice work with Principals and other school leaders; and 10 years of School Climate Surveys conducted in an action-research mode with 50 000 learners and 4 000 teachers.
The Building Peaceful Schools workshops and set-pieces are interventions in which teachers at schools are guided through experiences of different skills they can use to build peace, manage conflict and use Restorative Justice practices in order to understand their own and other people’s feelings and reactions, and thereby improve relationships with those people and make schools into places of peace, safety and fairness for all. It is to help schools do discipline differently. It focuses on the belief that ‘Peace begins with me’.
The BPS programme is a repeated set of workshops or meetings, where people sit in a circle and do various activities together, including: listening exercises, journaling, sharing from personal experience, discussions of various topics and guided reflections. These activities help them to learn skills they can use in their own lives.
You can download the Explainer below to read more about what this part of the BPS programme does.
The BPS Peer Mediation programme works directly with learners, equipping them with the skills they need to respond to conflict among their peers in a restorative way, without having to escalate things to the teachers. CIE has run the programme since 2016, and the response from learners has been amazing!
We have been running the Parental Engagement programme since 2023, and are steadily increasing the number of schools in which we are offering it. Parents and their children attend 4 workshops and benefit from home visits from trained parent facilitators, who help them to understand conflict management, budgetting, shared rule-setting and emotional intelligence.
Who benefits? Schools report that learners are improving academically and in terms of behaviour, and parents report that their households are more peaceful spaces!
Principals and school leaders need help too - and we have incorporate our Leading Restorative Justice approach into the regular coaching and support sessions we have with all the schools in our network. We also make sure that peace and restorative practices are on the agenda at every Principals' Forum meeting, which usually happen three times a year.
Everything we do is data-driven! We rely on two instruments designed specifically to assess the psychosocial climate of the schools in which we work: the School Climate Survey for Learners and the School Climate Survey for Teachers. Download the explainers below to find out more.
Peace begins with each of us. Peace begins with me!
