LGBTI+ Awareness Week

​Today marks the beginning of our 3rd wellbeing theme for the year. We join hundreds of schools, Youthreach centres and youth workers across the country as we celebrate LGBTI+ Awareness Week. We will show solidarity with those in our school who identify within this community and #StandUP to LGBTI+ bullying. This is never so more important as recent research shows us that:
 
Bullying, isolation, and a lack of acceptance has devastating effects on the mental health of LGBTI+ young people who experience twice the levels of self-harm, three times the level of attempted suicide, and four times the level of stress, anxiety, and depression – compared to their non-LGBTI+ friends (Higgins A. et al., 2016).  
Across the week we have lots of learning activities across the curriculum dealing with topics such as learning the LGBTI+ Lingo; the importance of respectful language; the impact of LGBTI+ bullying; gender neutral language and much more. We will highlight people in sport, history and science who are part of the LGBTI+ community and create some representative artwork. There are fun activities planned to deal with inclusion, kindness and on Friday we will create a CPPS rainbow of inclusion as each year group will wear an assigned colour and #ComeIn.
 
There will be lots of resources shared in the students wellbeing areas of Teams with some competitions also. We encourage parents/guardians to check in on this and if you would like further support or information on the topic, you can check out Home - BeLonG To The week is also been marked by 2fm who will host may conversations across the week which would be worth tuning into 🙂