Using Story to Convert Hearts and Minds

Way back in the Autumn term, we gave you a glimpse of why we do what we do the way we do it! At Ten Ten, we use storytelling at the heart of our programmes to give children and young people, in an age-appropriate way, vicarious experiences of personal challenges and conflict with others to help them grow in self-awareness and in their relationships with others.

Sensitive Topics in RSHE

Using storytelling as a vehicle of communication enables students to engage in deeper reflection about the situation, the characters, the motivation and the resolution in some sensitive areas of Relationship, Sex and Health Education such as gender stereotypespornographyNatural Family Planningabortion. It’s important that teachers are supported and can feel confident in teaching topics that are not their subject specialism, which is why we created the deep dive articles (linked above) to help them explore topics from a Catholic perspective in order to increase their subject knowledge and confidence in the classroom.

Supporting Teachers

To support those who are coordinating and overseeing RSHE in schools we want to make sure they are equipped, and so during this academic year we produced our Guidance on the Protected Characteristicsa Parent Communication Policy, and identified where the Keeping Children Safe September 2021 updates are fulfilled within our Life to the Full primary and secondary programmes.

In September 2021, we launched our CPD programme. We are delighted how these sessions went and the number of teachers, governors and parents who signed up to the sessions showed us the clear need to continue supporting schools through CPD provision. With this in mind, we’re delighted to announce our new CPD Package for the 2022-2023 academic year which features new sessions, but will also be repeating some of the popular sessions from this year, including the introduction to Theology of the Body for teachers sessions.

Collective Worship

Each week we send out assembly materials, daily classroom prayers, staffroom prayers based on the Gospel reading from the previous Sunday’s Mass as part of our Collective Worship subscription. This year we’ve had the additional joy of preparing resources for the Ten Ten Year of Pilgrimage which we launched in January. This is a series of assemblies within our regular Collective Worship programme which will take children on an exciting virtual pilgrimage journey from the comfort of their very own schools throughout January – December 2022, with ‘stopping place’ destinations across the year such as Jerusalem and Santiago de CompostelaRome and locations closer to home.  You can watch the short animation describing the Ten Ten Year of Pilgrimage here.

Occasionally, we share some of our Collective Worship resources more widely. Often with parents in our monthly Parent Newsletter (which is part of the Collective Worship subscription) but sometimes we share our Other Resources more publicly to allow other schools and groups to benefit from our creative work. Our Prayer for Ukraine and our COP26 prayer resources are prime examples of this from the past months.

If your school isn’t already a subscriber to our Collective Worship programme, you can find out more here.