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When the Internet and social media turns a fad into a global craze

When I was growing up, I remember countless fads and trends that came and went, either in the confines of school or within my group of friends at home. We could be trying to learn the latest cool trick with our ‘YoYos’, arming ourselves with plastic lemons full of water (our teachers hated that one!), skateboarding, scrambling on bicycles not built for the rough stuff and many more harmless activities that occupied us for a couple of months until the next big ‘thing’ came along.

It’s fair to say, and I think you’ll agree, that there was nothing particularly dangerous or sinister about our childhood fads (apart from those, maybe, that experimented with smoking or alcohol); however, in these days of social media, the historically innocent world of fads and crazes appears to have found a much darker and frankly disturbing format that worryingly some children appear to be compelled to follow.

In recent years, one of the most high-profile online crazes was the furore surrounding the Internet meme ‘Slenderman’ - a fictional supernatural character that was created on a horror Internet forum as part of a competition whereby users were asked to edit existing, everyday photographs to make them appear paranormal. The original poster submitted two black and white images of a group of children and added an abnormally tall and thin, phantom-like figure, in a black suit with no distinguishable facial features - this became known as the ‘Slenderman’. The whole phenomenon went viral on various social media, with a whole wealth of new photographs and stories appearing daily and it wasn’t long before claims were being made that the character was, in fact, real. In May 2014, however, two girls in Wisconsin took the phenomenon to a whole different, macabre level. When they allegedly took a twelve-year-old classmate to woods near their home and stabbed her 19 times, saying to the authorities later that they had attempted to commit a murder in order to become ‘proxies’ of the ‘Slenderman’ - their victim survived.

Another craze started out as a drinking game in Australia. The original idea of the game, which was given the title of ‘Neknominate’ or ‘Neck and Nominate’ was to ‘neck’ an alcoholic drink (usually a pint of beer) and then nominate others to do the same. When comments, images and videos of ‘Neknominate’ participants started to appear on social media platforms it again went quickly viral. The problems with these crazes come when the competitive spirit of some the potential participants takes hold and they consequently raise the level of the challenges. In the case of ‘Neknominate’, it was alleged that five people died as a consequence of the challenges - one participant fatally downed a pint of vodka, whilst another died after reportedly mixing an entire bottle of wine, a quarter bottle of whiskey and a can of lager and ‘necking’ the lot!

Thankfully, some good did come out of this irresponsible craze when a group of South Africans decided to turn it on its head and challenged others to carry out random acts of kindness for others - these also spread virally and picked up such titles as ‘Feed the Deed’ in Canada and ‘SmartNominate’ in France, which encouraged people taking part to give food to the homeless or donate blood.

Unfortunately, it would appear that the spread of crazy and downright dangerous pursuits over social media shows no signs of letting up. In May 2015, the Mail Online reported on a new, and in my opinion, staggeringly stupid, craze called the ‘Fire Challenge’, where young people filmed themselves pouring an inflammable liquid over their bodies and setting themselves alight. There were alleged cases where stunts went wrong and the participants were left badly burned with a 15-year-old in the USA reportedly burned to death when his entire body was engulfed in flames.

In more recent years we have faced other challenges from 'Am I pretty?', not a physically dangerous game but one which could destroy a teenage girls self-esteem, the 'Cinnamon Challenge' where participants tried to consume a spoonful of cinnamon powder', to the 'Blue Whale Challenge', which it has been suggested was a hoax, but nevertheless stories were found of young people taking their own lives as a result, to name just a few.

An now we face, quite literally, Momo. This challenge has taken over the media in recent days, with warnings from schools, police, charities and more about the dangers it creates. In brief, this is also known as the ‘suicide game’ played on WhatsApp. It begins with a disturbing face appearing (this image is actually taken from a sculpture by a Japanese artist). This character encourages young people to add contacts on the messaging service and then replies with threats of violence, and encourages self-harm and suicide. It is suggested that those responsible for ‘Momo’ are hackers looking for information. However, as with the Blue Whale Challenge, it seems that this too is a hoax, but it can still be causing distress to young people.

These days, social media provides a vehicle for fads and trends to spread virally throughout the global community like nothing else previously - even television cannot claim to have contributed to the proliferation of historical trends anywhere close to what the Internet can. The ubiquitous nature of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms that can be accessed via desktop and mobile devices means that any potential phenomena can reach a huge audience very quickly.

But not all Internet crazes are bad. A positive example of how a craze can go viral occurred in the US, by way of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, where a person dumps or has dumped on by friends, a bucket of ice water over their heads to promote awareness of the disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and encourage donations to charities involved in research of the disease. In the UK, people took part in order to support the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

It is often a great experience when you feel part of a movement or phenomena, you can say to friends “yeah, I did that too!” You feel part of an exclusive club or community and if the common activity is a force for good like helping a charity or showing kindness then long may it continue, but when it comes fads or crazes that demand risky pursuits, I am reminded what my parents said whilst chastising me, as a child, when I had done something stupid following the lead of a so-called friend:

“If Joe Smith jumped off a cliff would you follow and jump off too?”

Have your say

Have you had experience of social media trends in your school? What is your school doing to tackle the issue? What positive outcomes have you seen from talking to pupils about this? Let us know your thoughts and suggestions using the comments section below.

Could online training provide the most cost-effective and time-saving solution to staff training?

According to the recent ‘School Snapshot Survey’ report released by the DfE, “School leadership teams have been encouraged to prioritise the provision of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunities for teaching staff”.

Despite this claim, 91% of teachers surveyed for the report stated that there were still barriers to accessing effective CPD. 70% of teachers cited cost as the most common obstacle, while over half (51%) felt that insufficient time was a contributing factor.

Of course, CPD is just one part of the training story: there is also all the mandatory training, from induction and health & safety to GDPR and Prevent, which must also be kept up to date.

The cost of training doesn’t just begin and end with the course itself. The school also has to add the cost of supply cover if the training takes place during school hours. In addition, when trained staff leave a school, any knowledge learnt goes with them, leaving the school with the expense of paying to re-train another member of the team.

Add to that the challenge of finding time in an already packed school timetable and the requirement to evidence statutory compliance and the training task can soon become inefficient and time-consuming.

So, could online training provide the most cost-effective and time-saving solution?

Yorkshire based ed-tech company, TrainingToolz believes so, and so do their customers. Their bespoke platform for schools, TrainingSchoolz is a simple-to-use yet powerful platform developed specifically for the education sector. It has all the features schools need to create effective training courses, as well as policies and other information for sharing, along with the functionality to distribute, track and audit responses efficiently.

Kim Edwards, Senior Premises and Compliance Officer at Aspire Academies Trust and West Hertfordshire Teaching School Partnership, commented, “TrainingSchoolz makes training the school community easy to manage. Online dashboards allow me to see quickly the percentage of users who have completed the training”.

Darren Rose, a consultant and trainer working with schools and councils across the UK added “Safeguarding and e-safety are at the heart of schools’ compliance. I, too, for my small part, use this very powerful platform to provide data protection training and compliance reporting for schools (SLT, staff & governors). I would strongly recommend it as a platform for other content creators as well as for schools to create their own content”.

The TrainingSchoolz platform allows schools to compile their own training and policy library easily, adding video, audio and downloadable documents to their courses. In addition, TrainingSchoolz also provides a bank of ready-made policies and training courses. The assignments have been professionally written by experts in their field and are designed to save schools time and money over authoring their own training in common areas. Each assignment in this Training Library is fully editable, so schools can tailor it to their needs or use it as it comes.

For schools who would like to find out more about the platform, TrainingSchoolz offers a free sign up, where schools can create their own training courses or policies, or pick one from the fully editable library. And with the 10 training sessions included in the free package, schools can fully test out the system by inviting staff to complete an assignment and see the results.

To find out more, visit www.TrainingSchoolz.com

5 approaches that help schools tackle knife crime

In London, knife crime and youth violence have become depressingly regular features of the news. Week on week we hear about another young life taken, a family heartbroken and a community shattered. But it’s not just London that is being affected. All over the country, young people are under threat because of the carrying of knives. There has been a sharp rise in West Midlands, which includes Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and Walsall. The region has already recorded the highest number of youth knife deaths in 40 years, with six young people aged between eight to 19 dying from knife attacks within that police jurisdiction this year.

Ofsted have carried out research into how London schools are dealing with knife crime, looking at how schools are protecting pupils from the threat of knives while they are in school, and how they are educating pupils about the dangers of carrying a weapon outside of school. Many schools have been tackling this head on for a long time, yet it is now clear that all schools, no matter their location or context, have to develop approaches that safeguard children from this threat. This has to be based on the recognition that anyone can be the victim of knife crime because many young people are carrying knives. So here are five approaches that schools are using to help address knife crime.

1. Participate in the local area plan to tackle knife crime
Each area has developed a knife crime strategy and we should find out what it is and participate fully in it. We should be proactive. Schools need to take a full and active role in local area plans, understand what is available to them. Many people think knife crime is a policing issue. However, Scotland had great success from making it a public health issue. Schools there would bring in people from all walks of life to talk with young people about knives. This was part of a co-ordinated strategic plan which led to a massive reduction in young knife crime in places such as Glasgow. The years of austerity have affected our ability to tackle knife crime. Youth workers, mentors, youth clubs, community police officers have been proven to help reduce knife crime, yet many of these services have been eradicated. But we can’t allow that to be the end of the story. Schools need to identify and engage with any of these remaining services as part of their approach. If there is a lack of service, challenge the local authority for more! In London, the Mayor’s office has dedicated £250,000 to fund community projects to engage with young people and reduce the carrying of knives. This is in addition to the £1.2 million Young Londoner Fund. The Mayor of Manchester is bringing in similar schemes.

2. Engage with young people in meaningful dialogue
When you look at the stories of knife incidents, you’ll see that one group is often missing from the picture: professionals are not part of this story. Young people often don’t tell us about their experiences and fears. Sadly, many young people don’t tell school staff because they don’t think we can help. In London and Scotland, young people have said that they want to be engaged with by people from their communities who they know and trust, and who have experienced some of the same issues and challenges around knife crime. So where, when and how can professionals intervene in young people’s lives in a way that would reduce the threat of knife crime? Well we need to start by asking young people about their experiences, who they would speak to, what schools can do and listen to them. Scotland’s excellent support materials for schools and youth settings, ‘Noknives,betterlives’ states that we should be involving young people as equal partners which for school staff means observing, not judging, engaging in dialogue and bringing in other people that are not teachers. We need to use this to form an approach in our schools and provide chance for reflection so that we can positively influence attitudes, choices and behaviour. The focus should be on supporting young people to understand who they are, the decisions they make and the factors which influence them.

3. Use the available support resources
Many parts of the country have produced excellent resources for schools to help tackle knife crime. Scotland has been recognised for its success in reducing knife related deaths. These resources are now being used around England. ‘Noknives,betterlives’, ‘Benkinsellatrust’, ‘Londonknifcrimeapproach’ are just some of the free resources available. They include comprehensive lesson plans to promote dialogue, reflection, decision-making. There is also material available to introduce this at primary school too. The resources go much further than assembly ideas. They provide in depth activities to engage young people in dialogue, self-reflection, decision making. They can be integrated into the curriculum and are much more than one off lessons. Furthermore, there are resources for teachers, young people, youth justice workers and parents. So, have you seen them? Have you used them or considered where they can be incorporated into your curriculum?

4. Engage with parents
How do parents feel about knife crime? They are surely thinking about it. In terms of what they can do, they can often feel powerless. The resources mentioned provides help for parents to educate their children. Schools need to educate parents on what is available and what they can use. We also need to give parents the chance to group together, in communities, on their streets, so that adults can look out for children. Isolation is the great threat to parents playing their role in tackling this head on. As schools, we can be a centre point in the community to get parents together, to share the information and resources available and to ensure we are all talking to each other about our children. We need to remember that most schools are very safe places, but the knife tragedies are happening out on the street. Parents, alongside the police and other observant citizens have key roles to play but may need the help of schools to know what is available to support them.

5. Engage with high risk pupils
We know that some groups of young people are more vulnerable to engaging in and becoming victims of knife crime. Pupils who live in areas with known gang activity, those who have been excluded from school, those that get drawn into criminal exploitation as a consequence of being targeted and groomed. While schools need an approach that engages with all children, we need to be identifying potentially high-risk pupils and offer them access to mentors, youth workers and other proven interventions. We need to work with the police, health and social services sharing information to keep our pupils safe. In London, the police will let schools know which of their pupils is on their radar for knife related incidents. A recent YouGov poll found that 72% of parents believed that excluded pupils were more at risk of being involved in knife crime and serious youth violence. Yet currently, 1 in 3 local authorities have nowhere for excluded pupils to go. Couple this with the debate about many schools and academies excluding pupils too easily for not conforming to school rules and it is hard not to be concerned. We need to consider what will happen to young people that are at risk of exclusion and find every possible way of keeping them in school with us. Yes, that will be challenging, but the alternative might be much more serious and ruin their lives. We owe it to young people to do everything we can to ensure they aren’t cast off without any hope or support. They need to see that we will try to help them and that we won’t discard them.

Below are some links to websites offering further support and advice:
https://noknivesbetterlives.com/practitioners/resources/
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/knife-crime-educational-toolkit-lesson-plans.pdf
http://www.knifecrimes.org/Children-Young-People.html
http://www.benkinsella.org.uk/what

Have your say

Have you had experience of knife crime in your school? What is your school doing to tackle the issue? What positive outcomes have you seen from talking to pupils about knife crime? Let us know your thoughts and suggestions using the comments section below.