Beckenham School

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with Ministry of Education Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga logo and ‘Relationships and Sexuality Education A series of effective practice showcases’

Principal (Sandy) in a library talking to the camera

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Sandy: Making sure that our children can pick up a book in the library and go oh yeah that's just how our community is, is really important.

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with:
‘Beckenham’
‘Te Kura o Pūroto’
‘Inclusive school culture’

Aerial footage of the school

Sandy in a office talking to camera

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Sandy: Beckenham school is situated in the south of Christchurch city and it's a school of close to 500 children who come from a really diverse range of backgrounds and one of the things that we work really hard to do here is to make sure that we celebrate and really represent the diverse nature of our children.

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with ‘What changes have we made to support gender diverse ākonga?’

Sandy in a office talking to camera

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Sandy: Our initial thinking about gender came because we had a child in our school who transitioned. So we worked with Qtopia here in Christchurch and with InsideOUT and had PLD sessions for our staff.

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Screenshot of Inside Out webpage

Sandy in a office talking to camera

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Sandy: I can remember in the very early stages sending an email to our staff. The most important thing to remember is that the child is the same child - they haven't changed. What they want us to do is to change how we see them.

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with ‘What policies do we have to support inclusion?’

Sandy in a office talking to camera

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Sandy: One of the things that we looked at as a board was to really look at whether our policies promoted inclusion and what did inclusion mean and did our inclusive practices policy actually mention gender. And we felt that it was important and so we went back to our policies and made sure we wrote that in. They need us to do this to make them feel whole and so that's what we did.

We started seeing gender biases or using gender to organise things in schools where gender wasn't needed to be the way of organising. So an easy one - we don't line up in boys and girls lines anymore. We try really hard not to organise things on the basis of gender.

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Teacher (Jenny) in the school library talking to camera

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Jenny: Race officials, talking to the group of children who were lining up ready to do sprints. I noticed the amount of times that they were referred to as boys. “Boys listen up, boys step forward, boys do this.” And I thought for any child that's gender diverse or questioning,
they are hearing a repeated language about gender that might not be helpful for them.
Myself and a parent wanted to get a conversation started around what can we be doing to better include our gender diverse children in the way that we organise sport.

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Sandy in a office talking to camera

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Sandy: If the way we organise our school keeps on making them have to choose boy or girl and feel uncomfortable even if it's just inside with that decision, then that's - that's a problem. A really simple thing we looked at was our uniform.

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Screenshot of the school website Uniform webpage.

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Sandy: And so we took the boys and the girls headings off. We combined the list into a single list and said "uniform". and these are the uniform items. And children and families choose to wear what they feel comfortable in.

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Sandy in a office talking to camera

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Sandy: One of the things we've started doing over the last three years is having an induction workshop for our relievers at the start of every year. And we sit down and we talk about what are our fundamental beliefs and ways of operating at Beckenham. And one of the things we talk about is inclusion. We talk about the fact that gender isn't the way we organise things. That we celebrate diversity, we talk about restorative practice, and how we don't shame children. And just help them to understand that this is what we expect from our relievers too. And give them an opportunity to ask questions. And I do always say to them at the start of this workshop if by the end of the workshop you feel that this isn't a school that fits with your values or your beliefs then you're welcome to just send me an email and say please take me off the list.

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with ‘How do we develop and maintain an inclusive culture?’

Books on display in school library including - ‘Pride; Rainbow Revolutions; LGBTQ+ matters; Rainbow A first book of pride; George; Daddy, Papa and Me’

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Sandy: We've made a real effort now in our school to make sure that the books in our library reflect diversity. William's Doll, Heather has two Mummies. They're stories about normal people in our community. They reflect the diversity of our community too. And I think that making sure that our children can pick up a book in the library and go oh yeah that's just how our community is, is really important.

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Students (Fergus and JJ) in the school library talking to camera

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Fergus: I think it just opens up a broader perspective of everything and helps keep everything in focus and helps us actually understand this stuff.

JJ: Yeah and like, keep an open mind and just be well, that's okay if that's how this person feels.

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Parent (Alex) outside of the school with rainbow flag flown on flagpole in background

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Alex: The nice thing for me is I know I can have all these conversations with him at home and I know that when he comes into school he'll get backed up on those conversations.

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Sandy in a office talking to camera

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Sandy: The idea of putting pronouns at the end of your email signature came from some work that we did with Qtopia and InsideOUT a couple of years ago. And our teachers in our year 7 and 8 team chose to put that on their signature. And this year I thought, actually Sandy, this is something you need to do too. It sends a really strong message.

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Students (Fergus and JJ) in the school library talking to camera

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JJ: It's really important to use the correct pronoun if you're addressing someone because it could stop a lot of bullying and it can make them feel a lot more respected. And feel like they're being supported and they're allowed to be who they are or how they feel.

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Sandy raising a rainbow flag up the school flagpole

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Alex: I was arriving with my son Seth in the morning and we pulled up just underneath the flagpole as we always do, and I noticed it was the Pride flag. Now my son's six but we never really had a conversation about the Pride flag before. And so when we saw it I pointed to it and I said to him "that's your flag". And he said "what do you mean Mummy my flag?" and so I said to him it's for all the children at the school who have two Mummies or two Daddies, which of course is you Seth. And he was very proud about this and he talked about it for days.

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Wall display of various countries’ flags with ‘hello’ in each country’s language.

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Sandy: We had a flagpole already so we got the New Zealand flag and then we started inquiring about the cultural affiliations of our community. So we bought the Pride flag about three years ago, we've flown that several times. But last week was Pride Week and we made a really big point of putting it up the flagpole then.

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Students (Fergus and JJ) in the school library talking to camera

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Fergus: I feel like a lot of people at the school feel like it represents them.

JJ: If someone was walking past our school then they would just see that and know that we cared about it.

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with ‘What does this mean in the classroom?’

Teacher (Nicky) in the library talking to camera holding book ‘My brother’s name is Jessica’

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Nicky: Relationships, especially the relationships part of relationships and sexuality, it's not something that you can just address within a six-week block at the end of the year. It has to be something that's infused throughout your programme. So you know every week we'll make reference to something that's definitely to do with relationships and that it helps the children build that resilience that they need. It builds the strategies, the empathy, the understanding; they need that constantly.

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with ‘How can we be responsive to learners in our planning?’

Teacher (Jenny) in the school library talking to camera

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Jenny: We teach relationships and sexuality in term four and this is because by then you've had three terms of really getting to know your children. And we find that to be very helpful in making the sessions successful.

Nicky: We have positive behaviour for learning sessions every day, just a quick 20 minute snippet and there's a lot of relationship discussion that we build into that. For example we were talking about empathy today and how one develops empathy within relationships and that sort of thing.

Jenny: As a kura we wanted to take into account some student voice and planning for our strategic plan so we invited year nines to come back to our kura in term four and to give us some feedback on their experiences while they were at Beckenham and the things that really worked for them, the things that they felt had set them up well for high school and their lives in general, and to use their input in creating the strategic plan.

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Green title page showing a swirling lines pattern (from the Relationships and Sexuality guide) along with ‘What teaching strategies have been effective?’

Teacher (Jenny) in the school library talking to camera

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Jenny: When we're teaching sexuality and relationships we try to get a lot of voice from the children and we try to present the learning in a way that they are going to actively engage in. So it means that we might have starters that look at a music video or look at song lyrics or advertisements and so we're using a little bit of pop culture and we're showing them the world that they live in and using that as a platform to have further discussions with.

We want to make it really inclusive and find a way that everybody can get involved and gain from the learning without putting pressure on some people to speak if they're not comfortable yet. So the question box is a key part of our relationships and sexuality education.

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A small cardboard ‘question box’ with a slit in the top

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Jenny: We collect the questions in and we don't answer them straight away. What we're trying to do is address the children's questions but also think about what is the key learning we want them to take away from this topic. The questions are then used by us in planning future sessions. We know then that the topics are new learning for the students and it's topics that relate to them and that they're interested in.

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Students (Fergus and JJ) in the school library talking to camera

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Fergus: So with the question box it was like you would put in a little slip of paper of a question about something that we might or might not have covered in the lesson just that you can clarify, and it was anonymous so then everybody got their answers and everybody found out what they wanted to find out about and it was just fair and helpful.

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Teacher (Jenny) in the school library talking to camera

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Jenny: I think one of the things with the question box that makes it so appealing to them is that it's a time where an adult is willing to listen to their questions and respond to them. And if we don't talk about it and address it, they will find their answers out through some other means or they will just be left wondering.

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Teacher (Nicky) reading to a class of children sitting on the floor of a classroom from the book ‘My brother’s name is Jessica’

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Nicky: "I couldn't, said my brother Jason. I could see that he was becoming emotional now."

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Teacher (Nicky) in the library talking to camera holding book ‘My brother’s name is Jessica’

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Nicky: Another thing I love to do is choose novels to share with the children that really get them thinking and put them in situations where they're immersed in something that might not yet be part of their world so that they get different perspectives. And currently I'm reading the book My Brother's Name is Jessica and lots of discussion. We stop and we talk about it heaps, and I know that within the group I've got children who are very inclusive and so that sharing of perspectives when we do the discussion around the story is really important.

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Teacher (Jenny) in the school library talking to camera

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Jenny: One of the activities that the children really enjoy is the intimacy continuum. And so the children in groups are given a card which have different actions or different scenarios on them and they put them in the continuum as to where they think they belong from the least intimate to the most intimate.

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Students (Fergus and JJ) in the school library talking to camera

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JJ: On the intimacy continuum there was one side that said most intimate and one side that said least intimate and then I think you were in pairs and you got given a slip of paper that said like holding hands. You would place it on most intimate to least intimate on the intimacy continuum. And then you would say why you thought it was there and we'd talk about each one.

Fergus: I think that that continuum activity in particular was very good because it let the teachers know and everybody know what people thought about everything and like because there was no right or wrong answer, there wasn't something that was the most intimate and something that was the least intimate, it was just people's opinions so the teachers got to see and everybody got to see like what people feel about all this stuff.

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Teacher (Nicky) reading to a class of children sitting on the floor of a classroom from the book ‘My brother’s name is Jessica’

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Nicky: "...we wanted it for our own sake said Mum. We were only thinking of you.."

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Teacher (Nicky) in the library talking to camera holding book ‘My brother’s name is Jessica’

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Nicky: This is society, this book is about what's happening in our society today and I think that by sharing what's happening in society today within the security of a classroom where it can be discussed and shared is a really safe place for the children to learn about this stuff.

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Closing green title page with Ministry of Education Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga logo, www.education.govt.nz , and New Zealand Government logo.