In 2020, members of Valley View Secondary School’s Student Voice team worked closely with the Youth Affairs Council of South Australia to develop bullying prevention initiatives.
YACSA is the peak body that represents the interests of young people aged 12 – 25 years and youth sector workers, organisations and networks throughout the non-government youth sector. YACSA is a member-based organisation and works with and for members to achieve meaningful improvements in the quality of young people’s lives in South Australia.
The VVSS Student Voice members were recruited to the bullying prevention student group. YACSA worked with the group to ensure they had foundational knowledge about bullying and bullying prevention, and shared expectations about the purpose of the group. The student group brainstormed and discussed a list of potential projects for the group to pursue across the year. The group brainstormed activities for the National Day of Action against Bullying and Violence and began action planning the most popular ideas to contribute to the school’s event.
The group planned a whole of school National Day of Action against Bullying and lunchtime event consisting of multiple activities to raise awareness of bullying and promote positive and inclusive relationships.
Secondly, the group decided on creating banners for each of the school’s houses as their values align with bullying prevention messages and the group thought that promoting these values and the house system would be effective at encouraging bullying prevention. The group planned and ran a school wide competition to design posters for each house and their corresponding values to assist with designing the banners. The winning design was sent to a professional graphic designer to finalised the design.
The last project of the group was to develop a video that will convey the school’s message and promote the school’s approaches to preventing and responding to bullying. The student group informally reviewed the school’s anti-bullying policy and processes for responding to bullying to assist with creating a storyboard and script for a video. Members of the student group met with a media professional to discuss ideas and intentions for a video to promote the school’s approaches to preventing and responding to bullying. The student group drafted an outline and script for the video. Due to the events of COVID-19 the project was postponed until 2021.
In 2021, the student group worked alongside leadership at the school and a media professional to finalise the project. Student and staff volunteers took part the filming of the video across a full day and the final product came to life.