Why ESAS was Developed

Equally Safe at School (ESAS) stemmed from Rape Crisis Scotland’s work delivering its National Sexual Violence Prevention Programme to schools across Scotland since 2013. The programme has been highly successful in improving young people’s knowledge and understanding of issues relating to consent, relationships, gender and sexual violence. But workers delivering the programme also identified the need to work with the whole school community to embed and sustain key messages about gender-based violence (GBV) prevention, improve policy and strengthen responses to student disclosures. And so in 2015-16 we started to explore the potential for developing a whole school approach.

Whilst we were aware of a lot of good practice in Scotland, many schools, young people and other partners recognised the need to strengthen our shared focus on GBV as a major concern for schools, and to provide further guidance and support to help them address it comprehensively. So we started to develop ESAS to help secondary schools take a comprehensive whole systems approach to addressing GBV and promoting gender equality. It was piloted from 2017-2021, and then the tools, approaches and learning from this were developed into the ESAS website so that all schools across Scotland could access them. By launching the ESAS website we hope to enable meaningful and sustained progress towards preventing gender-based violence - so that young people grow up to expect gender equality, to reject violence and to know that they can collectively help to build an Equally Safe Scotland.