After six years and two months in the saddle, Mr John Toscana, outgoing principal of Olashore International School in this interview with IYABO LAWAL, talks about issues of bullying, harassment and safety concerns as well as challenges of running an elitist school, among others.
We are an international school but with very deep roots within the local Nigerian community. This is reflected in our curriculum, we follow mostly United Kingdom curriculum but also Nigerian curriculum as well. We try to find a balance by upholding traditional Nigerian values, while we are a member of Council of British International Schools, we try to bring in a number of modern practices.
But at the same time, we have had policies and systems in place for a long time that will reduce bullying to the barest minimum and also to deal with it firmly and effectively when it does happen. We also work on educating them well, providing avenues to share their experiences and building a positive atmosphere. if you have a strong, positive resource in the school, then bullying will be minimal. So it does go on but when it happens, we deal with offenders quite harshly, while we try on the other hand to remedy the problems.
Between 2016 and now, what are some of the challenges you encountered and what are some of the problems you think need to be fixed in our secondary education system generally? Every student in Olashore now has a personal IPad. So developing skills in our teachers so they can make use of the IPads during their lessons has been very important to us. That is on the academic side, which has been very successful.
Welfare has become so important, because as you dig deeper, you would find that many students have personal issues that affect their progress in school. It is a difficult age being a teenager and helping them through those times go a long way in getting them through school. We expect students to attend meal times, and if a student is not eating them, we expect the hostel parent to take some actions and if necessary, involve parents in that discussion.
The particular case you are referring to was in 2004, the difficulty we have with her is just trying to find exactly what happened because the record on it is very limited. I am going back to the UK and handling over to my successor Mr Guy Casacus, who would be leading the next phase
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Source: GuardianNigeria - 🏆 1. / 94 Read more »
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