CRESST's strapline "Conflct Resultion For Young People, By Young People" sums up our purpose. We help children and young people learn practical conflict resolution skills that can be used in their schools and communities. We train children, young people, and adults who work with them to understand and resolve conflict without verbal or physical violence, especially through peer mediation, undertalken by teh young people themesleves, and through "conflict caoching" training. .
Our work addresses the distress caused by playground fights and fallouts, and the damaging effects of conflict and bullying on school communities and on individuals. Our core activity, the Young Peacemakers Project, has worked to set up Peer Mediation schemes with more than 50 primary schools; many have taken up a “Whole School Approach” to conflict in primary schools, training 9-11-year-old young people to become Peer Mediators who work in pairs in the playground.
We have now developed successful models of conflict resolution education with young people at secondary school level.
Our help matters for many reasons. Research shows that peer mediation can be cost effective, easy to implement and help to prevent bullying. Schools report positive benefits, and are sustaining their programmes themselves with minimal additional cost. The work is fundamentally preventive; learning and using non-violent conflict resolution skills at school is a skill for life that is neglected in our education system. The positive effects of having student-led mediation and conflict management schemes are highlighted in comments made by all levels of school communities, from Ofsted and Governance to Senior Leaders, staff, students and parents; we have a wealth of qualitative evidence of our positive impact, and our records show that over 3,500 children and young people how become peer mediators as a result of our work. Charitable funding is required to sustain our work; schools contribute where possible, but cannot fund all the initial cost as the programme is extra curricular.
Typically, at a given tme we are working with a further three new primary schools and planning with several others. Most schools have sustained the scheme themselves with minimal additional cost. Including schools who have come back for “refresher” training around 75% of those 46 schools are currently running peer mediation schemes and we are undertaking further research to establish more detail on how schools sustain the Whole School Approach year-on-year. For each primary school adopting the Whole School Approach, on average: Around 425 people, including 350 children, benefit in the initial year and around 80 additional children and adults benefit for each year that the scheme is sustained.
We also work with youth organisations and the wider secondary school community, train adults who work with children and young people, and participate in local and national best practice networks including the Peer Mediation Network where we have taken a lead role in recent years.
Since 2014, CRESST has run "Youth REsolving Conflict" with young people aged 11-18, working with secondary schools. Funded for 3 years by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, with the aim of learining how a we coudl help secondary school students and staff to develop conflict resolution skills and experience. The first 3 years included lessons in conflict resolution skills to all staff and students, exploring individuals’ personal responses to, and beliefs on conflict, increasing their understanding, and looking at ways of de-escalating conflict and analysing others’ responses. Students step forward as volunteer mediators and receive intensive training to equip them to support other younger students in dealing with conflict in school. CRESST has now devleoped a new, fleible programme that we are offering to secodray school partners based on the eraining fomr the initial pilot.
Last year this initiative was instrumental in helping a group of young women aged 13 to resolve a vicious and damaging online conflict involving their whole friendship group. One of the group said “We’re not scared of going into lessons now. I feel comfortable in school and we’re actually friends now and we’re not worrying about what’s going to happen at break or dinner.… It’s important for us to decide what happens to resolve it because we are the ones going through this, the teachers aren’t our age, they don’t know what’s directly happened to us. So if we come up with the resolution we know it will get sorted”.
