On Monday 9th July 2012 CSIE were proud to help celebrate the achievements of thirty LGBT young people.
Since last September, we have been working on a collaborative project with Wiltshire Integrated Youth Service’s Trowbridge LGBT youth group, GoGs (which stands for Group of Gays, the name the young people have chosen for themselves), and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Education Policy in Practice (EPIP).
Over the course of the project young people engaged in a range of activities, including: learning how to market and promote their group; drama role play; presenting their work at the national Schools Out conference; hosting a question and answer session with trans speakers; and making a film about the effects of homophobia on learning, which is currently being used in the training of Ofsted inspectors.
Richard Parker, Director of EPIP, was joined by Janet Palmer, HMI and National Advisor for PSHE education at Ofsted, in handing out the awards to the young people. Ms. Palmer said “I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the work that you are doing in combating homophobia. Your video has already begun to influence change. Inspectors are now asking questions that they didn’t ask before. Good practice and bad practice is now being reported. That didn’t happen before. All leadership of Ofsted have seen your film. I burst into tears when I saw it because I knew it was going to make a difference. 1,500 inspectors are getting trained this summer and are seeing your video as part of their training. That is just the start of it. What you have done in that video is going across the whole country. You will be a part of human rights history”.
We are very proud of the achievements of the group and wish to thank them all, as well as the dedicated and inspiring youth workers – Siobainn Chaplin, Nic Sage and Ollie Phipps – for all of their hard work over the last year. It has been a pleasure and a privilege working with them.
The group is going on to run a ‘Zero Tolerance’ campaign in six local secondary schools that seeks to stamp out homophobic language.
A project evaluation report will be available shortly and will be posted here
