Specific Objective

• To develop, test and publish a toolkit that assists teachers, administrators, students, parents and the entire community to develop safer schools

Raising Voices is developing the Good Schools Toolkit, based on our experiences in our pilot school initiative. The kit aims to help teachers, students, administrators, parents and the entire community to create child-friendly safer schools. It articulates a conceptual framework, and proposes a practical step by step guideline for the entire school population that helps teachers to develop alternative approaches to interacting with children and helps children to develop ways of claiming their right to a safe school. The step by step process includes everything from conducting a survey to assess current attitudes and practices, to tools for better classroom management, to ways to recognize student effort and voice and even to involve parents. The toolkit includes a comprehensive training process to strengthen the capacity of teachers and students to appreciate children’s rights and to understand how violence retards children’s development and impacts on their identity.

Using this toolkit should be a fun and rewarding experience. There are sample disciplinary policies, games, posters, cartoon booklets, stickers, and a wealth of other materials to help schools along the process. You do not need a professional facilitator to put these ideas into practice. The kit is designed so that if an individual teacher or stakeholder at a school has a keen interest in creating a safer learning environment, s/he can become a Safer Schools champion and can advocate for the implementation of this process in their school. The Toolkit will be supplemented with an internet based information exchange forum and a community based support mechanism to help schools use them. It will be distributed to 500 schools in Uganda in 2008 and another 500 schools in 2009.