Friendly Schools & Families Materials
Whole-School Ethos Handbook
Ethos is a school’s fundamental spiritual characteristic or its sense of itself as a whole-school community. This includes its values and beliefs.
A school’s ethos is determined by the nature of the school’s community, its leaders, educators, learners, parents and supporters. The school ethos influences the policies and programs of the school which ultimately affect the vision of what the school community aims to achieve.
What is in the Ethos Handbook?
Principles for Success in Ethos
The Principles for Success for Bullying Reduction in Schools provide a framework for developing and implementing whole-school programs to reduce bullying in schools. This handbook provides the Principles for Success that have been identified as critical to the successful development of Whole-school Ethos. It also includes information, strategies and samples of from real schools to engage the school community in discussion and planning toward a whole-school response to bullying.
Every school has a philosophy about their purpose and how they will achieve their aims. The nature of this philosophy will determine the school community’s attitude to bullying and social relationships within the school community.
School Snippets
Case study examples, called ‘School Snippets’, have been included throughout the handbooks. These are designed to illustrate in a practical way the guidelines and activities suggested within each handbook. Teachers and administrators from schools involved in the Friendly Schools Research and contributed to the ‘School Snippets’ based on their experiences implementing the Whole-school Program.
In this school, assemblies were used to convey anti-bullying messages to the whole school community. The project team felt the assembly items were a very good strategy to ensure everyone received the same message and generally, assemblies at this school are well attended by parents.
A ‘values’ activity was conducted at assemblies whereby a different value (i.e. patience, being considerate of others, helpfulness etc.) was discussed. This was then followed by a demonstration by a teacher. Students were asked to give examples of how to demonstrate that virtue in practical every-day situations. Raffle tickets or faction cards were given to those providing an example, which were then put into a draw for prizes.
Check out
When samples, toolkits or extra resources are available to support the particular principle being explained there will be a ‘check out’ symbol and then references to the information.
Tool kits
Included in the Ethos tool kits:
- Newsletter items pack;
- Poster competition pack;
- Assembly items pack;
- Friendly Schools buddies;
- Values promotion Pack;
- Whole-school ethos and awareness raising strategies; and
- Schools case studies
Samples
Click each sample image below to see a larger version.
