This morning ten students from Oldham Academy North took part in a brand new project delivered by Oldham Athletic Community Trust.
The RESPECT Yourself Campaign delivered by OACT staff members Samantha O’Mara and Dale Harris is a new project aimed at educating the young people on the dangers of ‘sexting’ and using devices such as Snapchat to send intimate pictures to their boyfriend/girlfriends.
The project, which received great feedback from the students, uses real life stories from the media including the recent celebrity phone hacking scandal to engage with the students to encourage them to open up and discuss any events that they know of and the consequences of them. The project also covers what other pictures are too ‘risky’ to put on social media, such as including photographs in school uniform and giving away their location.
Oldham Athletic Community Trust have set up an email account (respect.yourself@oldhamathletic.co.uk) specifically for this project to help answer any queries, questions or give support to anyone who may not feel comfortable asking in the classroom.
Oldham Athletic Community Trust coach, Dale Harris, commented: "Today's session was just a trial to see if the students would engage with us on this particular topic. It went fantastically well; the students opened up to us and told us all about their stories from what happens in their school.
"At one point we flipped the stories on to them, the celebrities were now students at the school and the picture hadn’t been hacked, they had been shared on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. We were asking them how it would then affect their future, asking them to think about employment as well and how it may affect their chances of gaining a job."
One of the students in the today’s session, said: "It was great. We learnt a lot and it was not like talking to a teacher or your mum and dad. They let us discuss the things that you normally get shouted at for doing. We learnt all about Snapchat and the dangers of it and we had lots of fun while doing it."
We would like to thank Stacey O’Connor and Carol Higgs at Oldham Academy North for allowing us to trial our new project with their students at the school.