Respectful Relationships – Department of Education is an initiative of the Victorian Government Department of Education. It is a whole school approach that promotes equality, respect, and positive values, attitudes, and behaviours. It teaches our children how to build healthy relationships, resilience and confidence. At Timbarra P-9 College, we take a whole-school approach to this program and recognise that to drive real change, classroom learning needs to be reinforced by what is modelled within the school community.
Respectful Relationships education has become a core component of the Victorian Curriculum. The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationship curriculum is organised into eight key topics that are covered in each year level from Foundation to Year 12.
Topic 1: Emotional Literacy – Building the ability to understand, express and manage our own emotions, build empathy, and to respond appropriately to the emotions of others.
Topic 2: Personal Strengths – Supports children and young people to build their vocabulary to help them recognise and understand strengths and positive qualities in themselves and others.
Topic 3: Positive Coping - Provides opportunities for students to identify and discuss different types of coping strategies.
Topic 4: Problem Solving – Assisting students to develop their critical and creative thinking skills, and to apply them to scenarios exploring personal, social and ethical dilemmas.
Topic 5: Stress Management - Assisting students to recognise their personal signs and symptoms of stress, and to develop strategies that will help them to deal with stress effectively.
Topic 6: Help-Seeking - Helping students discuss the importance of seeking help and providing peer support when dealing with problems that are too big to solve alone
Topic 7: Gender and Identity - Assist students to challenge stereotypes and critique the influence of gender stereotypes on attitudes and behaviour.
Topic 8: Positive Gender Relations - Building an understanding of the effects of family violence and support students to develop the skills needed to solve problems, set boundaries within relationships, and play an active role within the prevention of family violence.
Timbarra P-9 Respectful Relationships Statement of Commitment
Our College has outlined the key implementation actions that we are committed in this Statement of Commitment document.