Meet the Peer Support Team

The Peer Support team is an aspiring team of 37 young students from years 11-13, serving as ‘alternative therapists’ or simply listeners to students across school. They offer different students of all age groups an obligation-free opportunity to speak freely and give their thoughts when faced with worry, insecurity, or any type of problem.

The members of the team themselves join out of their own free will and and undergo ten weeks of training with three certified counselors, and are taught to be accepting of people and their problems along with them and to empathize and try to understand them, providing comfort, reassurance, real-life solutions, or just a keen listening ear. The idea of having members spread out over three year groups is to allow students themselves to choose their own peer supporter that they’d be the most comfortable with to talk to instead of being limited to one person or one particular year group.

Members can be contacted via their emails, and while there is no set protocol to be followed, students can simply message the page to arrange a session, or talk online and even anonymously if preferred. The purpose of this is for the students to be able to treat sessions not as bona fide counselling, but more like a friendly talking session where students can get comfortable talking about whatever they want to.

See the slideshow below to find out more about the peer supporters:

“I joined because I genuinely enjoy helping people,” said Emily Parry of 11X2. ‘I personally find that empathy comes easily to me, and it just seemed like the perfect combination of the two to join the Peer Support team and help other students too!’ She also added, ‘I feel as if we students are well-equipped to help as we ourselves understand the student’s problems too, and we can understand them better.”

Maja Chan from 11G1 reaffirmed this, saying, “I, too, hope to make people feel better and make them feel emotionally healthier and help them to the best of my ability. Not only do I want to help people, I feel like this is a good opportunity for me to self develop and mature more, it really is a useful and invaluable experience.’

Samantha Lam 10X2