Friendship benches - the good and the bad please

[Ogg]

A friend and I have suggested to friendship bench for our primary as a cheap and effective inclusion tool for playtimes. (we both have sn kids). The SEN is very understanding and proactive and says they have considered it before but they fear it could end up as the 'Billy no mates bench' (my phrasing not hers)
Could I have your experiences/opinions of friendship benches also any examples of how you have seen them well implemented and managed. Thanks.

It can work if you run a school system of buddies. Where an older team of handpicked children are 'trained' to keep an eye on the friendship bench, try to find other children who also have no one to play with and to then instigate a game they can play together or to play with that child themselves. The older children love the responsibility and they are buddies on a rota so they don't get bored of the role. It can work very well but a member of staff needs to take responsibility of training and mentoring the buddies, introducing the scheme during an assembly or circle times and checking how the system is running. Without this teacher support the scheme can lose its momentum or can become very one sided. Maybe the school couldn't/wouldn't commit this teacher input. Buying the bench is just the start of it! We have a 'buddy bus stop'.

It works very well in my DC school (they have it in the infants playground only) but this is because the lunch/play time supervisors are totally on board.

Sometimes they (the playground staff) sit on it if they see a child alone so that child can come up and "play" with them (then the staff try and integrate the lone child into a grouped game).

They also sit in it (the staff) from time to time to show the kids how it works...

DS (now yr3) mentioned sitting on it a few times and straight away someone came over to ask him to play.

So yes, it can work very well but needs to be implemented correctly iyswim.

Sorry for sounding silly but what is a friendship bench?

A friendship bench is where a child can go and sit if they have no body to play with and then if implemented correctly the other kids will realise and ask the child on it to join in their game

Similar experience here to simpson/tinytalker - infants again.

Oh that's a lovely idea, I've never heard of it before, how lovely though!

Thanks everyone - anyone with any experience in junior years ? possibly more difficult to do successfully ?

The other thing which can work well is if the playground supervisors instigate a group game and include anyone who is on their own

DD's previous school had one. She says she gave up because it was embarrassing when she sat on the bench and still nobody came to play with her :( I don't get the impression it was properly implemented though, ie the bench was there but everyone thought everyone else was checking if there were kids sitting on it. If there were children/teachers nominated to check it every so often I can see how it might work.

In Vienna you could be talking about my daughter. She would sit on if and no one would come. Heartbreaking.

sunnyshine it's horrible isn't it :( I'm sure they're not being ignored as such, just no one noticing them- doesn't make it any easier though. I'm looking at a potential new school tomorrow (moving for unconnected reasons), what they do to help children struggling to make friends is on my list of questions.

Yes awful. I hope your daughter finds happiness at her new school and mine improves next year for my dd

I think it's one of those ideas that sounds great in theory but often doesn't work so well in practice.

If you just put a friendship bench out and hope it works, I doubt it does do much.

I suspect putting either older children or supervision staff in charge of looking out for children on their own will work more often with or without an actual place children can go to.

From my own point of view, I think I'd have probably been okay going up to someone on the bench and asking them to play. But there's no way I would have had the confidence to sit on the bench. Because if you sit on the bench and no one still comes up, then you really are not just unwanted but have advertised you're unwanted.
In the same way I didn't have the confidence to go up to a group and ask to join in, and was often on my own for that reason, so would have been sort of the prime child for whom this sort of thing being implemented.
I was happy to go and join in with the big games that the older children (year 6) and dinner ladies organised.