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CIS Perspectives: Child protection challenges in an evolving world

10 FEBRUARY, 2023

Thanks to our collaboration with specialists in a wide range of fields related to child protection, we can share their expertise and knowledge with our global school community as they navigate child protection and safeguarding responsibilities.

These valuable collaborations help us continuously evolve the themes and content of our well-established child protection workshops to ensure they meet the needs of our changing world.

To gauge where we are right now, we asked Susie March and Emily Meadows—both speakers at our Child Protection Foundation Workshop in Frankfurt on 24–25 May—about the challenges facing our community related to child protection and safeguarding and what our workshops can do to help.

What are the main challenges that the child protection and safeguarding community are facing?

Susie March, CIS Affiliated Consultant and specialist Comprehensive Sexuality Education consultant for international schools

I see the challenges in four key areas:

The increasing influence of, and ever-diversifying, online social media world in opinion-forming and decision-making for young people.
Covid isolation has inhibited social skills development in a large proportion of young people, causing problematic behaviour as we start to emerge from lockdown scenarios.
With increased exposure to adult material from a young age, schools are expected to navigate evolving problematic behaviours amongst the student body within this ever-changing landscape.
Staff recruitment, training, and retention. In a transient international community, it can be difficult to ensure consistent messaging and that training and development does not simply leave when a person leaves an organisation. A whole school approach that uses policy, training and regular information sharing, induction and staff briefings can be useful.

What can participants expect to take away from your workshop sessions?

They’ll learn how to harness stakeholder power. We’ll be looking at tools and tactics to win support from culturally-diverse parents, faculty, and the broader school community.
Frameworks, frameworks, frameworks! They’ll receive advice on how to select the right global frameworks to support comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in their context.
Even if willing, not everyone is suitable to facilitate CSE so we’ll look at how to approach that discussion respectfully and effectively.
We’ll also scope out the requirements for their school to meet CIS accreditation standards.

CIS Perspectives: Five steps to an effective health & well-being curriculum

28 JUNE, 2022

By Joanne Offer, Health and Well-being Committee Chair, St Michael’s International School, Kobe, Japan

Are you thinking of strengthening the health and well-being support in your primary school? Here are five steps we learned through our recent experiences at St Michael’s International School, Kobe, Japan.

Many of your school communities will be familiar with these contexts: Covid-19, being separated from loved ones, puberty, social media pressures, and acclimatising to a new culture … it’s no wonder that international primary schools are realising that a comprehensive health and well-being offering is crucial for their young learners.

So, we recently implemented a new Health and Well-being Curriculum with the aim of ensuring that children know how to be safe and healthy, how to develop positive relationships, and how to ask for help when it’s needed.

1. Buy-in is vital, 2. Tailor it, 3. Phase it in, 4. Be ready to deal with real and immediate needs and 5. Track it.

Tailor it

Our health and well-being journey actually started with a focus on comprehensive sex education; we realised that, in the online age, we needed to do more to address students’ needs than traditional puberty lessons had covered.

Staff attended training events (for example, those led by CIS Affiliated Consultant Susie March) and fed back to the wider school community.

Pretty soon, we wanted to broaden our focus into a more encompassing Health and Well-being Curriculum, especially with Covid-19 on our doorstep.

Positive mental health—and strategies to cope when things get tough—needed to be front and centre in any curriculum we offered.

Therefore, we planned our Health and Well-being Curriculum using the UNESCO International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education as a starting point and with an additional focus on mental health, with objectives woven in from the International Primary Curriculum’s Health and Well-being Rubric.

We also took inspiration from UK and Australian schools’ Personal Social Health and Economic Education plans and tailored it to our unique situation in Japan.

Consistency for children is key, so we agreed on a vocabulary to be used by all staff at all times; scientifically accurate terminology that is age and developmentally appropriate and also sensitive to the backgrounds and beliefs of pupils, staff, and parents.

See the full article here.

CIS Perspectives: Eight solutions to adapt safeguarding & well-being curriculum for remote learning environments

14 September 2020

By Susie March and Linda Woolcock

As schools moved education online in response to Coronavirus, a sudden shift to home-based learning and concerns about students’ academic progress meant that key elements of some schools’ safeguarding and well-being education were paused or weakened. Concerns about delivering sensitive sessions in remote learning environments have also led to some topics being skipped this year.

At the same time, some safeguarding and well-being risks have increased for many children as a result of the virus and the changes we have had to make. These include, for example, online grooming and sextortion, exposure to harmful content online, economic hardship and instability, domestic abuse, loss and grief, uncertainty and disruption. The isolation of large numbers of children from school-based interactions has also deprived them of critical sources of support and hindered educators’ ability to identify students who are struggling or exposed to harm. The increase in disclosures that many schools have received after reopening their campus highlights these factors.

Given these risks, safeguarding and well-being education is more important than ever.

[The Coronavirus] has up-ended our present and scrambled messages from the future ... PHSE education has never been more vital”

Jonathan Baggaley, CEO of the PSHE Association

Click here for the CIS page and click here to dwnload the full article

CIS Perspectives: Student well-being and high school transitions: Five big ideas in the context of the Coronavirus

The pandemic has brought uncertainty, loss and hardship to many students graduating from high school this year. In this post, we share five ‘big ideas’ that are emerging in transition programming in the context of the Coronavirus. We also share an overview of key findings from a recent survey of 134 high school counsellors based in 52 countries, plus an opportunity to be involved in a new CIS project to hear directly from students about how schools and universities can support their well-being in transition, and lots of links to resources and research.

Five big ideas

Transition is everything. This is true whether we’re grappling with remote working, planning student orientation, or supporting students with higher education decisions. There are common challenges for students, but travel and visa restrictions, and anxieties about well-being and accommodation are weighing on the minds of international students.

Dr Eleanor Parker and Susie March draw on their collective expertise and discussions from a recent CIS webinar—Key considerations for schools & universities during Coronavirus: How to support student transition to higher education—as they share some of the things emerging in transition programming in the context of the Coronavirus. (CIS members can watch the webinar in the CIS Community portal).

See the full article here.

Japan Council of International Schools

Implementing Comprehensive Sexuality Education through the lens of Child Protection: A workshop, Tokyo, run on 29-30 November 2019

Delivered in collaboration between Susie March Consulting and JCIS and hosted by the International School of the Sacred Heart, the workshop’s objective was to implement and enhance Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE). The two-day training course was open to member schools of the Japan Council of International Schools.

The course was designed for pastoral leads, teachers, school nurses and school counselors who have leadership roles in CSE, Pastoral Care, Health Education and Child Protection - and it developed the core knowledge and skills needed for a school’s CSE programme.

Beijing City International School

CSE: A YOUNG PERSON'S JOURNEY TO ADULTHOOD: Faculty training and parental engagement, Beijing, run on 23-25 October 2019

"For both children and adults, sexuality can be an awkward topic. Even to say or read the word "s-e-x" or discuss relationships can make people squirm. The fact that so many people avoid and find this subject uncomfortable is tantamount to its importance, and the sensitivity surrounding sexuality is representative of the need to be aware of and learn how to navigate this area from an early age.

Throughout the week of September 23, 2019, Susie March, a global Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) expert, came to BCIS to deliver a series of workshops to parents, community members, teachers, and students. These workshops focused on the complexity of young people growing up in a world surrounded by social media and the ubiquity of communications devices. CSE teaches young people how to make responsible and safe choices in relationships with others. It takes a look at human development throughout life, covering social, emotional, physical and spiritual development.

These workshops provided an extremely valuable opportunity for parents to become familiar with CSE and to engage with an expert in this subject area. BCIS is building upon its sexual safety campus infrastructure and curriculum by expanding CSE across the ES and SS, working with the Council of International Schools guidelines to best prepare students for adulthood. "Giving children and young people the tools to safeguard their health and wellbeing is as vital a part of their education as Math and English" – Susie March."

Link to the complete article on the BCIS website is here

2019 International School Counselor

Association Annual Conference: A keynote and series of workshops

"Counselors: The Heart of the School", 14-16 March 2019, Brussels, Belgium

School counselors are the heart of the school. The International School Counselor Association (ISCA) support and enhance the educational achievement of students through the delivery of curriculum, focused on student wellbeing. This year’s conference focued on building our capacity to lead and advocate in these areas.

To support ISCA's efforts in providing programs that address the wellbeing of the whole child, they inviteded Susie March to be their keynote speaker. During the conference Susie and Yoan Tranholm Reed, presented and ran workshops on..

How to introduce a comprehensive sexual education program in your school
Experiential teaching methods and creating a safe teaching environment
Values and attitudes towards Comprehensive Sexual Education
Aligning the standards of CSE, ISCA and Council of International Schools Accreditation
Parental engagement, a whole school approach

Susie March Visits Khartoum International Community School in Sudan - February, 2018

"Visiting CIS consultant, Susie March spent 3 days with the members of the KICS community last week. She met at length with the Child Protection Team on her first day before delivering two excellent presentations to parents on the 7th. Both presentations referred to the value of a comprehensive sexuality education curriculum as a prerequisite in guiding our young to face potential life skill challenges that include moral, ethical choices and decisions. Her underlying theme was how the digital world shapes our communication, social interactions and behaviours and how the adults need to catch up with its pace and the threats posed.

She led classes with students in Years 6/8/9/11/12/13 on various topics ranging from proactive safeguarding to sexual violence; all at appropriate developmental levels. The sessions were interactive and students were engaged and learning in a fun way. Students learned how to set personal boundaries and deal effectively with unwanted situations. Others were given a clear understanding of the semantics of CSE; most took away something in the way of knowledge, skills, values or attitudes needed to make informed choices about and for themselves.

On the PD day, Susie led a thought-provoking exercise with all staff on the Code of Conduct followed by a sobering session with Secondary staff on highly sensitive topics that can impact our young adults as they manoeuver through the social highway of adolescence.

Finally, Susie was able to share some insights into developing a solid CSE curriculum for KICS, advising on how we need to tailor it specifically to meet the unique blend of needs of our students and keep it culturally embedded for our special community."

http://www.kics.sd/index.php/kics-news/419-susie-march-visits-kics

Susie March in The IB Community Blog

"A child protection policy is as important as English and mathematics lessons”

21st July, 2016, in Thought Leadership

An integral part of a school’s child protection programme is sex and relationship education (SRE), according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Susie March, from Susie March Consulting, strongly agrees. She works with IB World Schools to develop SRE programmes, armouring students with relevant and up-to-date information that helps protect them from modern-day threats such as cyber bullying, online grooming and sexting, as well as sexual abuse by peers or those in a position of trust...

See rest of article here....

Interview with Susie March and the Association of the Advancement of International Education

Up Close & Personal With: Susie March Sex & Relationship Specialist

June-July, 2016, Leadership Connector newsletter

What made you want to work in the international education area of Sex and Relationship Education (SRE) and Child Protection? "I began to move into a health promotion whilst in my role as a nurse working in sexual health, women's health and family planning. When my family moved from the UK to Germany my children attended the Munich International School. Initially I volunteered to assist with the delivery of certain aspects of the Health and Social studies program to middle school students. There was a clear need to develop the program, whilst this took place, the school assisted me to learn effective pedagogical practices. From those small beginnings, I have branched out to other schools within Europe. Over the years, the approach to SRE and Child protection has evolved. Previously the information was very scientific but now it's much more focused on relationships and how people interact. Science doesn't drive it anymore."

See rest of article here...

Research article created in conjunction with Community of International Schools

Working with the Council of International School's working party on International Child Protection, Susie collaborated to create a research paper focusing on implementing an effective child protection programme through sex and relationship education.

October, 2015, Spotlight newsletter.

Throughout the world, mainstream media messages containing sexualised images via television, web, mobile phones or pop videos are bombarding children and young people. At the same time, evidence of institutionalised sexual abuse and the growing sexualisation of children themselves has become a constant. In order to address this appalling trend, there has to be social change. We have a responsibility, as members of the international school community, to protect our children; to do this we require support from all stakeholders – schools, faculty, parents and, most importantly, our students.

There is a clear need to scale up a standards-driven, fully integrated, SRE programme which provides our students with relevant and up-to-date information to help them protect themselves in the modern world. This article discusses the challenges, the changes needed and how effective SRE should be delivered: at its best, a close partnership between parents, SRE professionals and a motivated, well- trained, faculty.

You can download a copy of the paper in our Download section or from the CIS site.