Safe to Learn’s calls to action and tools have helped governments around the world identify the steps they must take to prevent and address violence in and around schools. Now, it’s their turn to ensure schools are environments where children are safe to learn, develop, and thrive.
Every year, millions of children and adolescents around the world experience violence in the spaces that are meant to keep them safe, their schools.
In spite of the high rates of violence experienced by learners in and around schools, these spaces can also serve as venues for transformational change to reduce violence and the harmful social norms and behaviors that drive violence perpetrated by teachers authority figures, and learners, themselves.
Promising evaluations of school-based interventions to reduce violence and establish positive learning environments demonstrate that addressing violence in and around schools can reverberate across entire communities and is a crucial step to creating societies where children are safe, protected, and thriving.
The power of partnership to end violence in and around schools
In December 2018, young people from across the world came together in South Africa to draft and launch the #ENDviolence Youth Manifesto, demanding global leaders take action for the children and youth of the world and to end violence in and through schools.
In response the Safe to Learn Coalition* was launched in 2019 at the World Education Forum to support the role of the education sector in addressing violence in and around schools.
Safe to Learn brings together 16 partners from civil society, the UN system, funders, and the private sector focused on two main goals: elevating the issue of violence in and around schools, and making prevention and response to violence a priority for the education sector.
By working with communities, decision-makers, teachers, and learners themselves, we can understand the prevalence and nature of the violence children are experiencing in and around schools and develop and scale up solutions to prevent it.
Calling on governments to take action to end violence in and around schools
The Safe to Learn Call to Action offers a blueprint for what works to end violence in and around schools and provides concrete benchmarks to measure progress and hold countries accountable. These calls to action for governments are:
Implement policy and legislation.
Once evidence-based legislation and policies are enacted, governments and multilateral organizations at the local, national, and regional levels must ensure there is the institutional capacity in place to ensure effective implementation.
Strengthen prevention and response at the school level.
Effective violence prevention requires addressing the harmful social norms and behaviors that drive violence, including unequal gender norms and stereotypes and structural gender inequality.
Shift social and gender norms and promote behavior change.
The development of positive, inclusive school environments is critical to strengthening positive norms and behaviors among all school constituents, including teachers, students, school committees, and local community members.
Invest resources effectively.
The economic returns for investing in preventing and responding to violence in and around schools are clear, with estimates showing that for approximately every $1 spent on safer schools, there is a return of $111.
Generate and use evidence.
We need clear evidence-based benchmarks for progress to find where the gaps are in a country’s efforts to ensure schools are safe. This is vital to develop policies and legislation, pathways and referral mechanisms, and strengthen prevention and response capacity in schools.
Putting these calls to action into practice
To support its calls to action, Safe to Learn has developed a technical package with two main components.
The first component is the Global Programmatic Framework and Benchmarking Tool. This provides guidance to translate the Call to Action into practice by highlighting the technical resources that can assist policymakers and practitioners in the design of interventions. It also provides a framework for monitoring and tracking results.
The second component is a Diagnostic Tool, which supports countries in measuring the degree and quality of their national efforts to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools. This provides national, decentralized, and school-level benchmarks to track progress and aid the prioritization of investments at the national, subnational, and school level.
Between 2019 and 2021, Uganda was one of five pilot countries that underwent a diagnostic exercise. With a sample of 30 schools in all 7 regions of Uganda, several key outcomes show promising steps to addressing violence in and around schools at different levels:
The diagnostic recommendations provide useful directions to inform the revision of the National Strategic Plan on Violence against Children in Schools (2015 – 2020) for 2021-2025, which provides strategic direction and priorities for Uganda towards the elimination of violence against children in schools.
The recommendations of the diagnostics are also being used to support the revision of the Reporting, Tracking, Referral and Response (RTRR) Guidelines. Developed by the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES), these guide schools in establishing mechanisms and processes for reporting, tracking, referring, and responding to child protection concerns.
The diagnostic report pointed to the need to strengthen the national child protection system and the functionality of child protection committees at the district level, in order to achieve more systemic reporting, tracking, and follow-up of violence cases.
The diagnostic was useful to realize there is a need for providing senior women teachers who act as violence against children focal points in schools with guidelines on their focal point role and support to building their capacities for this role.
It also highlighted gaps in data collection on violence against children. The Ministry of Education and Sports, UNICEF, and the Uganda Bureau of Statistics are working to improve this by integrating violence against children data in national statistics as well as other measures.
Ending violence in and around schools
Schools possess enormous potential for positive experiences, social-emotional learning, and violence prevention that extends beyond schools to homes and communities.
While civil society, governments, and the global community have made some progress in understanding and addressing violence in and around schools, there is much more work to be done to understand the prevalence and nature of this issue and how to address it through evidence-based, community-led, scalable and adaptable solutions.
Safe to Learn’s calls to action and tools have helped governments around the world identify the steps they must take to prevent and address violence in and around schools. Now it’s their turn to ensure schools are environments where children are safe to learn, develop, and thrive.
*Together for Girls is part of the Safe to Learn Coalition along with Civil Society Forum to End Violence Against Children, Global Affairs Canada, Office of the SRSG on Violence Against Children, UNESCO, Coalition for Good Schools, Global Business Coalition for Education, The World Bank, UNGEI, Education Cannot Wait, Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, UNICEF, End Violence Partnership/Safe Online, Global Partnership for Education and World Health Organisation.