On 31 January 2020, Liberate and Les Landes School are launching the DIFERA Jnr scheme with a day of diversity and inclusivity activities created by the school’s pupils and staff.

DIFERA is Liberate’s accreditation scheme for organisations that has members across the Channel Islands from all business sectors.

Paddy Haversham-Quaid, CXO Liberate, said: “We wanted to include schools in the DIFERA scheme, but knew that the offering to them needed to be a bit different as it had to include students as well as staff. We decided to partner with Les Landes school to pilot a junior variation of the DIFERA scheme as we were aware of the work they were already doing in this area.”

As well as auditing the school as a workplace for its staff, DIFERA Jnr also contains a day of activities for the pupils to encourage them to think about diversity, inclusion, fairness, equality, respect and acceptance in their lives. A staff champions group is also given training that enables them to train their colleagues and gives them material they can use and adapt in their lessons.

Vicki Charlesworth, Headteacher of Les Landes, said: “We were delighted to be asked to be the DIFERA Jnr pilot as we are a school that tries to embed the DIFERA values into everything we do. The year groups have each been asked to work on one letter of DIFERA and the day of activities has developed from there. Les Landes is the first Jersey school to be accredited in Philosophy for Children, and we will be using this framework to facilitate the discussion and enquiry work with the children. DIFERA Junior also supports our Rights Respecting School work; we are committed to promoting children’s rights. We hope that it will be a fun and thought-provoking day for staff and pupils.”

The DIFERA Jnr scheme has the ministerial team’s support and will be rolled out across other primary schools this year. If primary schools would like to find out more about the scheme, they can contact paddy@liberate.je

The development of the scheme’s training material was supported by RBC Wealth Management.