Transcript
KEZIA HERZOG
Hello I’m Kezia Herzog. During Session 4, you’ve been learning about peace among us, and how children and young people can act as peer mediators – and I was a peer mediator.
I used to attend Bacon’s College – you can watch a video showing how peer mediation worked there as well. In our school, the peer mediators were 16-18 year olds, helping with conflicts for students aged 11 and up. We were Sixth Formers and we mediated cases between students in the secondary school. However, some of us also worked on community cases, working alongside the then called Southwark Mediation Centre, now Calm Mediation.
I learnt so much in the week long training which I did almost ten years ago. We learnt active listening skills, team work, the importance of body language and how to facilitate an effective conversation between clients, with the aim of resolving the conflict.
What made the training work was the fact that everyone there was so passionate and dedicated and took it very seriously. We were treated like professionals by Mel and Dave, who trained us, and this made the mediators take it very seriously. But of course, we had lots of fun too!
The most exciting part of it for me was when the year 13 mediators joined us on the training. This is known as ‘peer apprenticeship’ and is when more experienced peer mediators support the training of the new ones. We watched them do role plays and got to ask them questions about how the service runs. There is power in peer work!
Sometimes it was challenging because we dealt with cases where the clients were quite reluctant to move forward. However, we always worked in pairs, sometimes more depending on how many clients were involved, and therefore we were never on our own.
What made it work in our school was because the staff members completely understood mediation and it was such a core part of our school. Because we would take the children out of their lesson time and conduct the cases during our free periods, the teachers had to be supportive of us. When coming to the door and asking if it was okay to take so and so out of their lesson time, the teachers always said yes because they realised the bigger picture: if a child is having a conflict, they will not be listening in the class anyway.
Society needs mediation conflict skills because we need to educate a whole generation of people that see conflict as something to collaborate in and resolve and not something to be shied away from.
Since leaving school, the peer mediation skills stayed with me. I still use them in my life every day. Mediation built my confidence, developed my listening skills and my ability to work as a team and make solutions.
I’m now a primary school teacher and in September 2023, I set up a peer mediation service in my school. I have just trained the second cohort of peer mediators. I’d encourage all schools to find ways to empower students and train young people to be peer mediators.