The PATCH Project

Preventing Abuse and Teaching Children Healthy relationships

Funded by the Scottish Government, this pilot project seeks to focus on working with children in P6 and P7 to help them to understand and learn about healthy relationships of all kinds.

From our prevention work in secondary schools, we have found that young people are keen to be educated on healthy relationships and personal safety earlier that S1. Using the Whole School Approach, members of the whole school community, (including teachers, other school staff, parents and children), are involved in working towards improving healthy relationships and safety for children.

Do we really need The PATCH Project?

83,000 childhood sexual offences were reported in the year ending 2020.

This is around a 267% increase since 2013.*

92% of girls and 74% of boys said sexist name calling happens 'a lot of the time'.

Sexual harassment has become commonplace and some children now consider these behaviours to be 'normal'.*

66% of students asked for these kinds of workshops.

Students in our TESSA workshops agreed that workshops should be available for children and young people.**

Reported cases of online grooming in Scotland have increased by almost 80% over the last five years.

The true scale of abuse is likely to be much higher as crimes often go unreported and technical failures at Facebook may have led to less information being passed on to authorities last year.

Grooming offences increased by 5% from 2019/20 to 2020/21.

Offences against children under the ages of 13 rose by 11%.

Workshop Summary Sheets

In order to support your child's learning after their PATCH workshops, we were asked by a number of parents and carers to make summary sheets available for each workshop. These included a summary of what we will have covered in the workshop, why this topic has been included in PATCH, and suggestions for how you might want to recap this topic with your children. These summaries are available to download below!

Please note, we have grouped the workshops into the year groups they will usually be delivered to (P5 receive workshops 1-2, P6 receive workshops 3-6 and P7 receive workshops 7-10),

but this may change if requested by individual schools.