CRESST is celebrating – five years of peer mediation success!

Training peer mediators in primary schools has been CRESST’s core work since we first started in 2004 – and that’s a lot of peer mediator training! We’ve worked with 75 primary schools, many of which have continued to run Peer Mediation schemes themselves, training children each year to take on the role of helping younger children to resolve their playground disputes.

Recently, we’ve been working with our Sheffield University partnership PhD student to examine the evaluation data from the past five years to understand the bigger picture of the difference that CRESST makes with our training.

Peer mediators are trained to help other children handle conflict well. They can enable people to maintain friendships by understanding what’s happened in a falling out and work out together how they’d like to move on from it. CRESST provides this within a whole school approach, offering training sessions for other children to understand more about conflict, and information sessions for staff, parents and governors too.

543 children trained and ready to be peer mediators

Our peer mediation training is based on a two-day interactive programme, which helps children to understand more about conflict and how people respond to conflict. It trains them in a simple mediation process and develops their listening and questioning skills to provide skilled interactions to help other children resolve their own disputes.

After each training programme, we ask the participants to complete a simple evaluation questionnaire. After our training almost everyone said they’d valued the training:

99.1% felt ready to be a peer mediator

99.5% had enjoyed the training

98.7% were looking forward to being a peer mediator

We also asked whether they felt the training had made a difference to them as a person and 89.9% said yes. Staff report children having more confidence and being more responsible:

“The children who’ve done the training are much more confident, not only in themselves but in their ability to change things, to make things happen.”

And children report the same:

“I’m always seeing it on the news about people who change the world and make it a better place and so I wanted to change the school and make it a better place.”

70% of participants gave us a 5 out of 5 score for the training, with a further 25% giving us 4 out of 5. We were interested to discover that we got our highest scores in deprived areas. Have a look at our infographic to find out more.

Training for teaching staff and lunchtime supervisors

As part of our whole school approach, we also provide training sessions for staff. Feedback from them tells us that they also overwhelmingly enjoyed the training, understood the peer mediator role and would refer playground disputes to peer mediators in the future. This understanding and support from staff is key to the success of a peer mediator scheme.

Find out more

We’re delighted to have such positive findings from our training and have created this simple infographicto share the news. Or if you would like more in-depth information about the impact of training as a peer mediator on children and in schools, then why not check out some of the feedback we’ve received from children and staff involved in this project in the video below.