Daily Safeguarding News - Safer Schools NI

National homework task to be set for World Mental Health Day

World Mental Health Day is on the 10th October.
ITV, the Chartered College of Teaching and other mental health charities have launched a homework task to try get pupils talking to their families about their feelings as part of ITV’s latest ‘Britain Get Talking’ campaign.
ITV’s Good Morning Britain conducted a OnePoll survey of 1,000 parents of 9–15-year-olds, which showed that 74% are more likely to talk to their children about child-focused topics like homework, than about bigger issues like war and conflict (17%) or money issues (22%).
This initiative notes that doing homework may be one of the few times during the week that a young person will ask for help.
This homework exercise asks teachers and schools to send children home with the task of asking a trusted adult for a conversation about their worries.
The hope is that over time this could make a difference in talking about subjects that are hard to face.
For more, please visit the TES website.

OpenAI has announced that it is adding new voice and image-based capabilities to ChatGPT.
A user will now be able to verbally ask ChatGPT to complete a task, only requiring a few vocal prompts to guide the narrative or simply asking it a question.
ChatGPT will give its response in spoken word form.
The new voice feature is powered by a new text-to-speech model that can generate human-like voices from text and a snippet of sampled speech.
These new features will roll out to paying ‘Plus’ and ‘Enterprise’ subscribers in the next two weeks.
Voice will be limited to the ChatGPT Android and iOS apps initially on an opt-in beta basis and image search will be arriving on all platforms by default.
For more, please visit the Tech Crunch website.

Ulster University have conducted research which has shown that the education system is “bewildering” for many parents and hinders the development of innovative, shared solutions that help address sustainability issues within the system.
The figures provided in the report show that the annual cost per pupil of a primary school with less than 60 pupils is currently £5,805.
While sustainable guidelines state that no school should have less than four teachers, currently one in 20 of NI primaries face that scenario.
Tina Merron, Chief Executive, Integrated Education fund stated a new and better way of delivering education must be found, and that this “publication will help inform the forthcoming Independent Review of Education, the implementation of the Integrated Education Act (NI) 2022 and help to inform education policy.”
For more, please visit the Belfast Telegraph website.