Unleash Self-Defence came in to deliver two identical half-day workshops, one to each half of the year group, alongside our Politics Day workshop, running as a carousel.
They gave brilliant personal safety advice for everyone, as well as specific advice for girls/women. Their self-defence techniques are cumulative as they build on them as you go, and they also teach you to refine the technique as you go.
They taught us the reasoning behind the moves, how to develop a mindset which could potentially save your life, and they used real-life testimony to illustrate the effectiveness of learning these techniques – including what has happened to them and the young women they teach on their courses.
As well as teaching their programme, they also took questions from the pupils as to what they specifically wanted to learn, so we had requests from Year 10 to learn how to punch, questions about how to handle yourself if you have a knife pulled on you, and a request to be told about how to get out of a choke hold.
The sessions were all role-played first, by the instructors, before the students were invited to undertake the techniques themselves. Less effective ways of performing the moves were also role-played, so the students could see simulations of the consequences of what could happen if the moves were made wrongly.
They were constantly inviting audience participation (modelling scenarios, asking questions involving deduction, checking on confidence levels, etc.) as well as getting the pupils to role-play the techniques on each other. It is a very rare activity when every pupil is participating and having this much fun at the same time as learning about serious situations!
They gave us a lot of wisdom, safety tips, and self-defence moves which help girls/women navigate and maximise their safety in the “concrete jungle”.