Lucinda Young

We are a group of parents with kids at Castlemaine Secondary College. We are passionate about supporting our local school to prevent violence and develop a culture which is inclusive, engaging, trusting and caring. Let's face it - who isn't! The difference is, we have a plan and are making it happen.....


The Short Story….
Alongside CSC, we are supporting a lead teacher, Alana, to train as a Jigsaw Facilitator. She will be attending two weeks’ intensive training at the Centre for Non-Violence and will commit to over 200 hours of private study.This is what Alana has to say about the program....

'The Jigsaw program will enable young people in our community to be explicitly taught social and emotional skills to be able to manage the tougher things in life. Student’s ability to work through conflict, work together and model these skills to others will continue to make our community a safer place for everyone.'


The Longer Story….
We know that in order to learn well, people need to feel safe. High school is a big time for teenagers, there’s a lot going on socially, emotionally, and it’s a time of intense vulnerability. Whatever is happening for a student, at home, or out on the street, arrives in the classroom or school yard eventually. With a curriculum to deliver, for the most part, schools are not well resourced to deal with the many life challenges faced by students.

A screening in 2010 of Kids Business inspired us to try and find a way to bring Solving the Jigsaw, a violence prevention program, into our local schools. Our group has since worked with CSC as part of their Student Engagement & Well-Being Policy to develop a 3 year 'Jigsaw Plan'. Up until now, we have supported the school to train teachers in the fundamentals of the program and the response has been positive:

‘This Jigsaw professional development gave me further strategies that l could use to engage students about sensitive matters. It has also given me an awareness of the multitude of forums that are used to create distress for students. The PD also gave me a greater level of confidence in dealing with, and engaging students in sensitive conversations as a result of knowing how to begin to address most of the concerns that students have discussed with me...’

The program you will be supporting teaches students and the school community skills that will serve them well for life and it’s no exaggeration to say, these skills can save lives.

Bringing about change can be a slow and difficult road and needs someone to drive it. We’ve found a great ‘driver’ and we need to give her the skills to do the job. With some intensive training and the right support, having an in-house ‘expert’ to support students, teachers and parents as CSC has been something we’ve been dreaming of since we got started.

Alana will be able to support a whole school approach in a professional capacity and be able to facilitate sessions with groups of students and teachers within the school. What this means for CSC is their own, 'in-house' expert classroom teacher who really gets it.

Supporting this change will have a long term impact assisting CSC to develop its own internal resilience, having less reliance on the services of Solving the Jigsaw program. That means, we have fewer funds to raise, and ultimately our group aims to become irrelevant! That's gotta be good for us, the school, but more importantly the students!

We have achieved plenty so far with positive support from the school and would like to provide another piece of the puzzle, so to speak. We want to train one of the school’s teachers to be a Jigsaw Facilitator. This teacher can then educate others (staff and students) in the program. We have a keen as mustard head teacher (Alana) ready to attend two weeks intensive training with the Centre for non-violence. She will be committing over 200 hours of private study time to achieve this position.

To put a dedicated teacher through the Jigsaw Facilitation Program:

Training costs, including course fees, accommodation and air fares.
The training is only being offered once this year and wait for it....it's in Byron Bay, but don't worry, there is nothing extravagant on the agenda and we've been assured by Alana that there will be no fun, sun or beaches involved - at least not at our expense!

You might ask why the school can't fund this themselves...jolly good question! To our knowledge and experience, being a public school, they are under resourced across the board. Whilst we might not all agree philosophically in paying for things that the 'government should' we don't want our kids to miss out in the meantime! In short, they've got us by the short and curlies! We support actions that seek to fund public schools more adequately....

If we go beyond the target funds, we have need for plenty more, we'll put your money towards the next lot of training for other teachers at the School. Not a cent will be wasted!

Our main risk at this point in time is - you guessed it - money!

We’ve been at this fund raising game for over three years now and we hope this approach will be a small step towards needing less funds in the future – instead building a skills bank at the school.

We know that our schools do not receive enough funding to even operate established programs, let alone be able to afford innovative new programs and training such as this.

This year we decided to try ‘Pozible’ and go to our community - partly too because we want you to know what's happening - and have the chance to contribute!

We are also aware that there is a risk that the teacher we are supporting could leave at some point down the road. All we can say is that we have her reassurance that this is not on the cards, she has a full-time, ongoing role at CSC that she loves, she's young, she's healthy, she's just found a great new home close to CSC.... we can do no better than this....

Or can we? We believe that what Alana will bring to the school whilst she is there will have lasting influence, that the Jigsaw program will empower our school community to support our young people in the best possible way into the future, that's what we're backing.