Child Safeguarding Corner

The Child Safe Standards provide us with tangible guidance about how to create cultures, adopt strategies and act to put the interests of children first to keep them safe from harm. Every fortnight over the last two terms, I have presented one of the standards and asked the community to reflect upon how well we’re addressing the recommendations. We welcome ideas and feedback from our families and community! 

This week, we’re looking at the final standard, Standard 10: Policies and procedures document how the organisation is child-safe.

The aim of this standard is to ensure that policies and procedures are championed by leaders, localised, understood by staff and clearly communicated.  This standard is important because, when implemented effectively, child safety policies and procedures provide guidance and clarity to staff volunteers, parents, and children on how to prevent and respond to child safety issues. 

Our aim is to prioritise this standard for child safety in what we say and do:

• Child-safe policies, Codes of Conduct and complaint-handling procedures are publicly accessible. 
• Staff understand and implement the Child Safe policies and procedures.

We now have a page on our school website dedicated to Child Safeguarding, and we encourage you to view it. If you have any questions or feedback about how we are addressing this particular Standard or about our new Child Safeguarding page, please email me (petra.cole@cg.catholic.edu.au).

Friendology

St Matthew’s is proud to be a URSTRONG school. URSTRONG provides a friendship skills curriculum, Friendology 101, that helps our students to establish and maintain healthy relationships, manage conflict with kindness, and increase their overall resilience. 

One of the first foundational concepts in the friendship skills curriculum teaches our students about the very normal cycle that friendships go through. To learn about this, we use the Friend-o-Cycle diagram. As Friendship Fact #1 teaches us, no friendship (or relationship) is perfect. It’s normal for us to encounter conflict with our friends. Research shows that about 85% of conflicts at primary school are what we call: Friendship Fires. These are normal, low-level friendship issues like misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and disagreements.

The Friend-o-Cycle helps children see that Friendship Fires are a normal part of a friendship and, when they’re put out in a respectful way, can actually make a friendship closer and stronger. 

When trust and respect are central, friendships can survive conflict and get back into the healthy zone of the Friend-o-Meter. The Talk-it-Out phase is where skills come in (and children need to practise these!) to put a Friendship Fire all the way out and move on to Forgive & Forget.

We encourage you to join URSTRONG for free, and support our school by sharing the same messages and teaching the same skills that we teach here at St Matthew’s. URSTRONG provides simple but meaningful language and skills to open up a dialogue with your children.You can join URSTRONG for free: https://urstrong.com/.

Petra Cole

Assistant Principal ┃Child Safe Advocate┃Classroom Support Teacher