22^nd October 2021
See below for Polish translation

Dear parents and careers,

The past two years have presented significant challenges to us as a school community, and as a society. Wider societal issues concerning prejudicial language and discrimination affecting so many people has become an important and pertinent area that we, at St George, want to challenge consistently and effectively.

We aspire to ensure that all children feel safe and respected, regardless of their race, religious beliefs, sex or gender, and as such, will be focusing a lot of work this year on ensuring that St George has a zero tolerance approach to any form of discrimination.

Following Ofsted and the DfE’s reports and expectations released at the end of last academic year, we will be embarking on collecting students’, parents’ and staffs’ views on prejudicial language and behaviour; what exists in school that is not seen and reported, and how effectively students feel issues relating to these are dealt with. After the DfE’s report in June regarding how sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools is commonplace, we also need to find out what issues students are facing which we are not aware of. With high profile movements, which we need to ensure students understand, such as the #Metoo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and most recently the Everyone’s Invited movement, we are committed to ensuring that students feel safe and respected, and that they feel they can discuss any issues of prejudicial language and behaviour. It is at the forefront of many issues and conversations, and we want to ensure that students can safely and respectfully discuss these.

We have had a significant focus on this so far this academic year, through assemblies and the PSHE / RSE curriculum, and as part of this, we now have Equality Advocates in school, who are the first port of call should students have any issues or concerns about what they have seen and heard in terms of prejudicial language and behaviours.

We will therefore be conducting a range of surveys over the comings weeks, in order to gain some insight into what attitudes are prevalent both within school and outside.
Students: We will ask two tutor groups per year group to conduct a survey focused on their attitudes to prejudicial language and behaviour, and sexual harassment. Students have had several assemblies so far this year focused on these areas, and this will give a representative sample of students’ views. However we will then share the survey on their year group MS Teams pages, and I will be actively encouraging as many as possible to respond to this. I would ask for your support with this, by encouraging them to respond to this. The more responses we get, the more accurate our response to this will be.

Parents: Once these have been completed, I will send out a link for you to complete an online survey. I’d really appreciate you completing this for us so that we are aware of what your views are.

Staff: staff will also be asked to share their views and experiences, as well as how confident they feel about dealing with prejudicial language and behaviours.

We will then use this information in order to determine what intervention, training and other work needs to be carried out from the Spring term, in order to ensure that such behaviours are not commonplace.

I have also attached a leaflet from local education authorities, which outlines what the protected characteristics are, from the Equalities Act of 2010, and how to have positive discussions with children about any issues relating to these. I would appreciate it if you were able to have these discussions with your children.

So, I will be in touch in a few weeks’ time to share the online survey with you, but in the meantime, please could you have these discussions with your children, and encourage them to complete the survey when it is made available, whether they have witnessed or been subjected to any prejudicial language or behaviour or not. Should you wish to contact me regarding this, my email address is jpreston@stgcc.co.uk. If there are any safeguarding concerns you wish to raise, please use the school’s established safeguarding email address staysafe@stgcc.co.uk.

Thanks in advance for your support,

Mr J Preston

Head of English and Equality Lead