Good School Toolkit-Secondary Schools Pilot Trial

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Physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and adolescents are widespread, and school is a prime risk environment where children and adolescents are exposed to such violence. Main perpetrators of violence against children and adolescents include peers, intimate partners, and in some settings, including Uganda, school staff. In Uganda, sexual and intimate partner violence are one of the top 10 leading causes of disease burden.Raising Voices, a Ugandan non-governmental organisation, has developed the Good School Toolkit, an intervention to prevent violence from school staff towards students, and peer violence between students. It is a whole-school approach which aims to reduce multiple forms of violence and change power dynamics underpinning violence, by changing the operational culture of the school. We tested the Toolkit in a randomised controlled trial in 2012-2014, where 21 schools received the Toolkit and 21 received it after the study ended. The Toolkit was highly successful in reducing physical and emotional violence from school staff to students and peer violence between students. In 2015-16, we decided to adapt the Toolkit so that it could be used in secondary schools. We partnered with two secondary schools, and spoke to administration, teachers, students and key stakeholders in Kampala to explore their violence prevention needs. We found that the levels of sexual violence and violence in intimate partnerships were higher among secondary school students versus primary school students. We created and tested new activities to address this and to address gender inequality in schools.Now, we will conduct a pilot test of this new adapted Toolkit. Our aims are to: understand whether the new Toolkit is acceptable and understandable to secondary school staff, students, caregivers and other stakeholders; feasible to implement in secondary schools; to test measures that we can use in a larger study to determine the effectiveness of the Toolkit; and to explore whether secondary schools, staff, and students are willing to participate in larger-scale research on violence prevention.We will partner with 8 schools in wider Kampala, Uganda. Half will receive the new Toolkit intervention, over a period of 18 months, and the other half will receive the Toolkit after the end of the 18 months. The research team will conduct surveys, observations, qualitative focus group discussions and interviews with staff, students, caregivers and other stakeholders to understand whether the intervention is acceptable, understandable, and feasible to deliver. The research team will feed back results iteratively to the Raising Voices' team implementing the Toolkit, so that refinements to the Toolkit can be made in real time.At the end of the project, we will have a fully optimised Good School Toolkit for secondary schools, and information we need to efficiently plan a larger randomised controlled trial to test the effectiveness of the Toolkit in reducing physical, sexual and emotional violence between staff and students, between student peers and within student intimate partnerships.