By Chris Thomson | posted on August 23, 2018
CONSTABLE CARE will be seen in schools around the state, including in the Great Southern, for the next four years thanks to a new $5 million contract secured with the WA Police Force.
The Weekender can reveal the WA police will pay the Constable Care Child Safety Foundation $5,684,989 to raise awareness of crime prevention among school children aged between 4 and 17.
Foundation CEO David Gribble confirmed the contract, which commenced on August 12, would run until August 11, 2022.
“We have had a very close working relationship with WA Police for many years, and this is actually our third preferred service provider process from the State Government for delivery of a range of different services on behalf of WA Police,” Mr Gribble said.
“We [will] work state-wide within that agreement to provide in-school theatre and education programs primarily around all aspects of crime prevention and safety and mental health.
“That includes pre-primary through to Year 12 and the spectrum from [in primary schools] protective behaviours, road safety and cultural understanding through to [in secondary schools] alcohol and drug abuse, bullying, relationships and mental health issues … and we get to over 100,000 kids every year across the state.”
Mr Gribble said the contract would see between two and four actors at a time venture south from Constable Care’s HQ in the Perth suburb of Maylands to Albany and other spots in the region.
“We typically will run upwards of 16 or 17 week-long tours to regional areas every year, and part of our contract is that 25 per cent or more of what we do in our contract has to be done outside the Perth metropolitan area,” he said.
“Because the Great Southern is a large population area, we will do a lot of work there.”
Mr Gribble said the Constable Care program covered a dozen different topic areas that were tailored to meet the needs of individual schools.
“We can run any of those topic areas and they’re driven by what local communities and schools are telling us are uppermost in their community at the time,” he said.
“In upper primary and secondary school we use a best practice process called ‘forum theatre’ that is actually designed to stimulate a conversation with young people so they can participate in solving problems.
“We present a short scenario that ends in an adverse outcome, and then we work with the student audience to ask the sorts of decisions that the characters made along the way, how could we have … tried a different strategy or said a different thing … and what we do with those audiences is we get them up on stage to take over from the actors to act out what they think would work in a real-life situation.”
The Foundation was the only organisation to bid for the restricted tender process.
Constable Care has become somewhat of a statewide treasure since his feet first hit the beat in 1989.