Period Poverty – FREE sanitary items for students

You may be aware of the national statistics linked to period poverty:

• “Period poverty has forced more than a quarter of females to miss work or school, survey finds” ITV News, 18 February 2019
• “One in four girls or women left in period poverty, unable to afford sanitary products” Metro, 19 February 2019

This issue has also been flagged up as a concern from the Youth Parliament vote that we conducted at Clyst Vale earlier this academic year.

We complete a puberty unit in Relationships & Sex Education, where both girls and boys are educated about the impact that periods have on girls. This is aimed at developing the students’ knowledge about both physical and emotional changes.

The Chancellor announced that, from early 2020, every child in England will be able to access menstrual products when they need them, as free products will be provided in all schools and colleges. This means that we are able to extend our current distribution of sanitary items.

Sanitary items will be available in the toilets and we will be distributing packets of items from a stall this Friday 6^th March. Students will be able to choose which items they would like to take away with them.

Moving forwards, we will be running the stall on a termly basis for students and they will be able to easily access these items from designated staff. Sanitary items are free for students, and we will be having them delivered regularly each term. We hope that this will help develop student’s knowledge of menstruation across the school.  We will be trialling a range of pads and tampons and will be extending the range according to the students’ requests.

Mrs Bennett

C42 Co-ordinator