Safe Schools aims to empower schools to minimize risk of all forms of abuse and equip students and teachers to deal with incidents of child abuse in a child-centric manner.

NS Educational Trust was set up in 2004 by Lalitha Chandrasekaran, an educationist with 25
years of experience leading schools and her husband, Chandrasekaran, an entrepreneur, with the
vision to use education as a socio-economic leveler. What started as a free after school tuition
center for children in the Sholinganallur area in Chennai became a full-fledged school called
Ramana Vidyalaya (RV) in 2006 to cater to students from tsunami-affected communities. Over the
past 15 years, RV has evolved into a middle-income school that caters to students across the
socio-economic strata where 25% of all students are provided with subsidised or free education.

About 6 years ago, a few incidents in the community exposed the gaps in awareness about
child safety. To address the issues and make the RV community a safer place for children, we
collaborated with Tulir, an organization that specializes in working on Child Abuse, to put in place a
comprehensive infrastructure that ensures that safety and wellbeing of the children that included:

? a school-wide child safety policy along with recruitment safety checks, codes of conduct for
staff and students etc. to facilitate personal safety and cyber safety
? bringing external child safety experts to conduct knowledge and skill building sessions for
the management, students, parents and staff
? a child safety committee to guide staff and parents to identify and report incidents of child
abuse, handle these incidents with the well-being of child at the center
? guidebooks for parents, teachers and children on prevention and identification of incidents
of abuse
? continuous teacher training to sensitize staff around child abuse, gender discrimination
and tools to create inclusive classroom spaces.
The experience of implementing these structures across the stakeholders and monitoring
the outcomes helped us reflect and refine them over a period of time. This learning has now
evolved into the Safe Schools Framework, a comprehensive guide to setting up holistic structures
for safety and wellbeing from scratch in any school. Now, we would like to take this to as many
schools as possible starting with low-income schools in Chennai.