Education

The third of our themed workshops was attended by 13 practitioners across 10 organisations. The aim of this workshop was to exploring the broad range of issues surrounding ‘Education’. This is obviously a very broad topic area and our launch workshop had captured many of the challenges in this area such as teacher workloads, the need for cultural sensitivity and awareness, and accessing young people in the first place.

We began the workshop by exploring and clustering issues that related to education.

This identified four key themes to the issues that are arising in practitioners’ work:

1. Curriculum – knowing what content is effective in changing behaviours, the need to respond agilely to trends, age appropriateness of interventions, and how to assess effectiveness.
2. Education across the criminal justice system and professionals – the need to change cultures and address the inexperience of professionals.
3. The role of schools – understanding what interventions are being delivered and by whom, understanding whether this is effective, and how this impacts on reporting/disclosure by students.
4. VAWG in a digital world – exploring the challenges of effectiveness of approaches in the new ways in which VAWG is being enacted in digital spaces.

Again, we went through our filtering process and three areas of work were identified as key areas to focus on: Curriculum, Role of schools, and VAWG in a digital world. Participants then worked in one of three groups to break these topics down into key questions to address:

1. What curriculum is effective in intervening in VAWG? (led by Dr Lucy Neville)
   This project will look at what we know works/is best practice in relation to different components e.g., the content of intervention for children, looking at comparisons across U.K. and international practice, modes of delivery, sector delivered by. The second component of this work will explore how effectiveness is usually established with regards to these interventions. 
   The findings from this project can be found in the Project Summary: Interventions with children and young people (PDF, 252kb).
2. Understanding the role of schools in intervening in VAWG (led by Dr Jo Murphy)
   This project will explore what content is delivered around VAWG in school and by whom. Secondly, this will seek to understand how schools are evaluating their practice in this area to ensure that it is effective.
   Due to the timescales involved to engage with schools, this mini-project was not completed within the timescales of the project.
3. What is the likely pathway from problematic consumption of online material (e.g. incel, Tate-ness etc) to becoming perpetrator of violence, victim, or both? (led by Dr Di Levine)
   This project will draw together some of the evidence from the literature regarding pathways to these types of behaviours and explore practitioners’ views of these issues and how to intervene.
   The findings from this project can be found in Project Summary: VAWG in a digital space (PDF, 213kb).