Rainbow inclusion in schools

As part of a strengthened rainbow-focus, Pink Shirt Day and the Mental Health Foundation funded InsideOUT to run a series of Creating Rainbow Inclusive Schools workshops across Aotearoa.

These workshops provided an opportunity for students and staff to discuss the issues facing rainbow people in schools, and ways to make their schools more rainbow inclusive. Wrapping up at the end of last year, the findings have been released ahead of a new roll out of 40 workshops starting this month and running through until June 2023.

In addition to providing students and staff with knowledge and skills to challenge bullying and make their schools more rainbow inclusive, a team from charitable organisation InsideOUT gathered information on the experiences of rainbow students, staff and allies within Aotearoa’s schools. The experiences relayed add a strong voice to the data available on rainbow young people’s experiences at secondary school in NZ, from studies such as Youth 2000 and Counting Ourselves.

The report discusses workshop evaluation and the key findings, including behaviour from school staff, students, community and school systems, environment and curriculum. InsideOUT looks at the impacts of these issues and some of the things schools are doing well.

InsideOUT will be delivering 40 further individual school workshops across Aotearoa as part of this partnership between May 2022- June 2023. 

Contact your local InsideOUT Schools Coordinator if you are interested in one of these at your school.

Also, this week, a campaign to fund gender neutral bathrooms in New Zealand schools was launched by a gorup of students at Albany Senior High School. The students hit the national media spotlight are successfully campaigning to get gender-neutral toilets at their North Shore school.

Now, they want the Government to make good on its election promise to provide gender-neutral bathrooms to all schools.

Read the InsideOUT report here:

Creating Rainbow Inclusive Schools Public Report 2020-2021