John Sesay tells us how his mediation scheme helps the school and local community
The mediation service in Bacon’s College has been very important and beneficial. It serves both the college and the community. We recently won an award at the ‘Enough is Enough’ award ceremony held at the Tate Modern for helping cut down on anti-social behaviour in Southwark. This award was earned due to the large amounts of Safer Southwark Partnership road-shows we took part in and our campaigning against antisocial behaviour as well as gun and knife crime.
In addition to this, the mediation team runs a very effective service within the college. The students have the luxury of many services such as conflict resolution workshops which bring together young people from different classes who have certain problems with their peers and members of staff. They are encouraged to come together and explore alternative ways of dealing with conflicts. They normally finish by writing and signing an agreement form for future references. At some stages, there is a huge influx of students and staff but they all work together to reach a positive outcome and make a difference.
There is also a service specifically for year sevens. The ‘Year Seven Awareness Sessions’ project is important as it’s a mini introduction to mediation and conflict resolution for younger students. The students get to see role-plays set by mediators and comment on what they see. They are given the opportunity to explore issues that make them angry and how they will cope with these issues without using violence. This project has been really successful, as these young people get to learn about the service that we offer and some of them even start to form bonds with the mediators. This helps them build up trust in the mediators and they are able to understand what the service stands for and what the service has to offer.
A recent development in the service is the introduction of a programme called ‘The Mediation Art Workshop’. This programme brings together both art and mediation as a channel for young people. The aim of this workshop is to help young people learn about each other. We use a very important tool called ‘The Identity Box’. The students will use their knowledge of arts to create an identity box. The box will be a representation of themselves and they have to include items into the box. There are traditionally six parts that make up a person and these are individual personality, culture and heritage, family and friends, experiences, values and beliefs and their environment. At the end they all will come together to view these different boxes and come up with ideas on how to tolerate and live together even though each and every one of them in different.
At the moment, the service is running really well thanks to the dedicated peer mediators and staff. The service receives a high influx of cases and the mediators never fail to sort these cases out effectively.
John Sesay Peer Mediator – Bacon’s College, London
Bacon’s College Mediators are trained and supported by Southwark Mediation Centre
