School Diversity Week 2019

The SHIELD team have been busy again!

For the past month, we’ve been preparing resources and activities for next week: School Diversity Week 2019.

Our video below explains the main themes of School Diversity Week.  Be sure to give us a like on YouTube!

 

School Diversity Week is an initiative backed by the government.  Over 150 schools in the UK (and beyond) are hosting activities and charitable fundraisers to raise awareness and support for LGBT+ young people.

The charity, Just Like Us, produces a free toolkit to help teachers and pupils run an event in the week that celebrates LGBT+ equality and challenges prejudice in schools and our wider communities.

We’re very proud to be a Stonewall Champion School for the second year running and proud participants in Norwich Pride in July, where members of SHIELD march in the parade.

Have a safe and happy week!

 

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Autism Awareness Month 2019

Although it has been a little while since this event occurred at Hellesdon High School, we wanted to give you a quick update on how we marked National Autism Awareness Month this April.

We decided as a group that we’d like to design a Tutor time resource to show all pupils and staff, from Year 7 to Year 13.  We felt that this could be more informative than making a video (our usual method of communication within school!) because we could quote experts and give more statistics than we might remember to say if we just spoke on camera.

Here are some of our slides from the Tutor PowerPoint on Autism Awareness:

 

The PowerPoint certainly raised debate in Miss Baker’s own Tutor group, with pupils asking sensitive and sensible questions about how many pupils in the school may evidence signs of being on the spectrum and how they could help to support pupils with ASD in school.

A successful afternoon at UEA for SHIELD

Recently, we told you about SHIELD’s planned trip to the University of East Anglia to talk to the student teachers there in the EDU faculty about teaching inclusion and diversity in their own classrooms. We had six speakers this year, ranging from topics like “Inclusion of LGBT+ themes and characters in Literacy” to “The links between English Literature and People with Autism”.  We also offered ourselves as gurus for the student teachers to question about our ideas, views and experiences at school on these topics.

Here are some photos of our lectures this year :

We are happy to report that we had a fantastic day and received some lovely feedback from Dr John Gordon, the Head Lecturer in Secondary English at UEA:

“Thank you again for bringing SHIELD to speak with the UEA group at UEA yesterday – I hope your students enjoyed it and that you felt it was valuable for them too. They did an excellent job.”

SHIELD feel very privileged to be invited to UEA for the second consecutive year to provide a safe environment for student teachers to ask questions about how they can best support the wellbeing and inclusion of pupils for their own professional practice.

Welcome to the SHIELD website!

 

What do you do in SHIELD?

In SHIELD we talk about events that are going to happen in school, volunteer to trips, relax, have fun and eat sweets which were kindly bought by Miss Baker the awesome.

How can I join SHIELD?

To join SHIELD, all you have to do is either go to A11 at lunch on Tuesday Week 2 or talk to Miss Baker in B7. And also, you wont believe this but, you don’t have to pay to join such an awesome club! You even get a cool badge!

So why not come down to A11 at lunch on Tuesday week 2 and help others in need! The club is run by Miss Baker, we are thinking about starting a YouTube channel and we have 2 new editors called Dominykas And Jorris.

Hope to see you soon, 

SHIELD.