The Hlayiseka School Safety Project
School violence has reached concerning proportions in south Africa. In an attempt to develop an intervention to assist schools to start dealing with crime and violence proactively the National Department of Education, the Open Society Foundation of South Africa (OSF-SA) and the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (CJCP) undertook a four year partnership.
The partnership resulted in the conceptualization of the Hlayiseka Project (Tsonga word meaning "Be Safe"). This partnership included developing a toolkit, piloting the toolkit in 3 provinces, conducting a process evaluation and refining the toolkit. The toolkit is aimed at the school management team and has the following objectives:
- To help the school to understand and identify security issues and threats
- To guide schools to respond effectively to security issues and threats
- To establish reporting systems and to manage reported incidents appropriately
- To monitor the schools progress over time
- To integrates existing departmental policy and legislation to ensure that school safety is not an "add on"
Following the refining and finalization of the Toolkit, Hlayiseka was rolled out, through the National Department of Education, at Ministerial priority schools throughout all nine provinces. Further roll-out of the Toolkit has been conducted through partnerships with various provincial Departments of Education, as well as through provincial departments of Community Safety. The CJCP is currently assisting the Department of Education in KZN, Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Free State, North West, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Gauteng to implement the toolkit in a selection of schools.
A publication on the project can be found here: CJCP Issue Paper No. 6: Building School Safety – The Hlayiseka Project. (LINK TO ISSUE PAPER SIX) More information on the Toolkit itself, or on the training, can be obtained by contacting the CJCP office.
The CJCP school-based and youth safety research emphasises the importance of an ecological approach to youth and child safety. The Hlayiseka toolkit is being expanded to include modules that address parenting, and draw parents into the issue of school safety. These additional modules are being rolled out in partnership with the Open Society Foundation (OSF-SA), as part of their Safety Sites project, in Elsies River in the Western Cape. All additional schools at which the CJCP trains on the Hlayiseka Toolkit will now include these additional parenting modules.
