Children | The Good School Toolkit | Good School Toolkit for Primary Schools

An Evidence-Based, Whole-School Intervention

The Good School Toolkit is designed to influence a school’s entire operational culture. Since its publication in 2011, the Toolkit has been implemented in over 1,000 schools in Uganda. This evidence-based approach has broken new ground in the field of violence prevention.

Our Core Principles for Implementation

Regardless of where it is implemented, the Good School Toolkit’s evidence-based approach always involves the same core principles:

It walks you through change! The Toolkit guides education stakeholders and schools through a six-step process of change. Schools evolve step by step, ensuring sustained engagement and avoiding the chronic cycle of awareness-raising or jumping straight into action.

It uses a whole school approach! A critical mass of people across all levels of the school ecosystem reflect on power, human rights, and how these issues impact the overall operational culture within the school. From this foundation, they work together to create (and sustain) lasting change.
It is personal! Change is more than just a program or a job. It is a part of us. The Toolkit helps children, school staff, and community members to reflect on their own lives and relationships before trying to influence others.
It works! The Toolkit is helping to create happier, healthier, safer relationships between children and adults in schools, as well as between children and their peers, between schools and their surrounding communities, and between teachers/students and school administrators.

Toolkit Activities

The Good School Toolkit suggests 68 activities that schools can undertake to change their operational culture. Activities include dialogues, school assemblies, suggestion boxes, collective formulation of school policies, booklet clubs, student courts and many more. As part of our ongoing learning and evaluation processes, we are currently collaborating with research partner IDinsight to take stock of the Toolkit activities to see which create more impact—and which create less. This 18-month process, slated to end in mid-2022, will feed into the scalable, lighter Good School Toolkit Agile.