Adaptation of the Good School Toolkit for reducing violence in secondary schools

Violence against children and adolescents is highly prevalent and associated with numerous negative health and social consequences. An intervention we have been testing in Uganda, called the Good School Toolkit, is effective in reducing physical violence from school staff to Ugandan primary school students. The Toolkit, by Ugandan NGO Raising Voices, is a complex intervention that takes a whole-school approach to support students, staff, administration and community members. The intervention consists of a series of steps designed to: change school culture to encourage mutual respect; facilitate student participation and leadership; foster critical reflection on power relations and violence; and provide staff with alternatives to corporal punishment and improved teaching techniques.

We want to adapt the Toolkit to see if it can reduce violence against secondary school students. To do this, we will examine patterns of violence in secondary schools to see how they differ from patterns observed in primary schools. In conjunction with key partners, we will decide how best to adapt the Toolkit, and new materials will be added. For example, we may need to add more content on sexual violence, which may be more common in secondary school students versus primary school students. We will test our new adapted intervention to see if it is acceptable to secondary school students.

Violence against children and adolescents is highly prevalent and associated with numerous negative health and social consequences1-3. Our preliminary analyses show that the Good School Toolkit, by Raising Voices, can significantly reduce the levels of physical violence from school staff to Ugandan primary school students aged 11-14; analyses are underway to look at effects on emotional and sexual violence from staff, peers and others. The Toolkit is a complex behavioural intervention which takes a whole-school approach to support students, staff, administration and community members through a series of steps designed to: change school culture to encourage mutual respect; facilitate student participation and leadership; foster critical reflection on power relations and violence; and provide staff with alternatives to corporal punishment and improved teaching techniques4. In secondary schools, where students are older and school cultures are different, patterns of physical, sexual and emotional violence will differ and interventions will need to be tailored accordingly. The goal of this proposal is to adapt the Good School Toolkit for use in Ugandan secondary schools.
The study will consist of: 1) development of a revised Theory of Change for the Toolkit at secondary schools, and assessment of the need for adaptations and new components, 2) adaptation and development of intervention components, 3) acceptability testing of the revised intervention and an assessment of intervention needs and preferences. The proposed study will be a continuation of an existing partnership between Raising Voices and the research team, and will be steered by an advisory committee including representatives of the target population.