Durrington High School: Focused team-building workshops launched 10 years ago

Ten years ago, Durrington High School first had the idea of running focused workshops to encourage new students to work together, instead of against each other, in a bid to prevent bullying. At the end of September 2011, all 360 year-eight students at the school in The Boulevard took part in two days of workshops, which featured team-building events on the field and You Have a Choice anti-bullying drama workshops in the hall.

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Gill Luck, the senior teacher who organised the event, said at the time: “This is the first year we have staged the event in school and it was a great success. It was totally inclusive, with all students taking part. The aim of the days was to allow students to develop team skills with their forms, enhance and develop new friendships and to participate in a range of enterprise skill development activities.”

How to get a ping pong ball out of a drainpipe and how to resolve bullying were just some of the challenges faced by the students. There were eight outdoor challenges to enjoy, including a leap of faith where teams had to swing on a rope, a crate challenge to see how many milk crates they could stack before they fell over, and water-based activities which saw most people get wet.

The anti-bullying drama workshops, organised by Emily Isham, the head of drama, were led by year-10 GCSE and BTEC drama students, who performed an open-ended piece about a young person getting bullied.