Beatbullying and Every Child Matters

BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community offer a comprehensive provision of peer support training through which pupils’ potential to be supportive to one another is fostered through appropriate training and supervision. By implementing BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community, the strengths, capacity for emotional literacy, skills and resources that children and young people possess, can be harnessed to enrich their own lives and those of others in their school, their families and their community. Crucially, BBMentors forms a protective cloak around those that will indicate their vulnerability and seek the interventions of their peers. BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community will reach out to and provide the empowerment tools needed to assist all children and young people. Beatbullying also seeks to narrow the gap in educational achievement between children and young people and their peers from lower income and disadvantaged backgrounds.

It is therefore important to understand how we can place the contemporary application of BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community within the wider Change for Children agenda, specifically the five key outcomes of Every Child Matters and the Every Disabled Child Matters campaigning objectives BBMentoring is not exclusive – it is inclusive and why both sets of outcomes are relevant.

Being Healthy

Emotional health and well-being are fundamental behavioural cornerstones of BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community. Peer mentoring is not merely about having a buddy system in place for those being bullied. Mentoring should, in practice, be about providing a curative intervention protocol, delivered by well trained, motivated children and young people. BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community will also present healthy behavioural choices and appropriate diversions as part of its curative make up for those that would traditionally not be enrolled on these programmes. Not all Mentors will be naturally confident or forthcoming. To be truly inclusive, we must be prepared to engage with those who are disengaged. Mentoring will involve developing an understanding of healthy and unhealthy relationships as it skills participants to recognise conflictual and problematic relationships. PSA’s also underpin further relevance to BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community and its wholly inclusive approach by stating clearly in its vision that: Adolescence brings new challenges with increased exposure to risky health behaviour. The PSA to Increase the number of children and young people on the path to success, aims to help young people make healthy choices as they grow up to become adults and, potentially, parents themselves.

Staying Safe

A prime concern for many children and young people is their own personal safety, especially where bullying is concerned. With bullying clearly affecting young people’s lives in the home, in the community and during and after school, ‘staying safe’ must be considered in a much wider context. Improving children and young people’s safety, by empowering them through BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community will engage them in debating and finding solutions for their peers on a vast array of safety concerns. BB Mentors will be trained in devising with their ‘mentee’s’ safety plans and action plans that will also be overseen by supervising staff, to help them understand potential problems and isolate them and /or find alternatives to those occurrences / sustained incidents of bullying. Safety planning is an underestimated peer to peer tool and encourages co-operation; bring control to a situation that can feel uncontrollable.

Achieving and Enjoying

BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community will evidence measurable impact on a school community and communities outside of school. Those measurables include that learning nirvana – achievement with enjoyment. BB Mentors will progress through a challenging and also rewarding programme that will test their abilities and young citizens in a challenging world. Beatbullying has always understood that children and young people make substantial personal investments in terms of energy, credibility, enthusiasm and also experience of bullying when training to be mentors. We must reward this investment, but we must also recognise through the training that they are on the path to lifelong bullying prevention and help them see that these skills are contemporary and relevant to a quickly changing, sometimes morally ambiguous, society. These curative intervention skills and mentoring skills are transferable into the workplace and can have a wider positive societal affect.  

Making a Positive Contribution

BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community will also at the heart of its mission, aim to significantly raise the educational achievement of all children and young people meet the needs of each child enabling them to reach their full potential by ensuring that inclusivity and opportunity mean exactly that; that disabled and looked after children matter as much as other children; that those who self disclose that they consider themselves to have a disability are not ignored and also compelled to be contributors; that disability, economic disadvantage, those for whom academic study and rigour represents a barrier to achievement, are no longer sidelined or marginalised – intentionally or otherwise by well meaning but poorly executed policy and legislation.

Realising Economic Well-being in Adulthood

Due to the extensive and intensive training they receive, BBMentors will possess the critical lifelong bullying prevention and mentoring skills that this country desperately needs if we are to finally get to grips with a damaged and disengaged youth and see a significant institutional shift away from the culture of bullying that is still pervasive in our wider society.

Economic well-being will be achievable through BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community because we will seek to empower and increase the number of young people on the path to success through guaranteed participation and opportunity, access to influencers and decision makers and by accrediting their learning and building partnerships with wider stakeholders who will be receptive and responsible to this valuable vocation.

The BBMentors in schools and BBMentors in the community model will, by default, encourage, nurture and empower Primary, Secondary and SEN students and finally give them through the wider mentoring programme being established, through partnerships in the FE, Higher and University sectors, and the workplace, the bridge into adulthood.