Hollie Gazzard Trust founder Nick Gazzard OBE has visited Beaulieu School in Jersey as students begin a year-long programme designed to help young people recognise coercive control, stalking and unhealthy relationships.
The programme, led and delivered by the Hollie Gazzard Trust, aims to give both students and staff a greater understanding of the behaviours that can be present in unhealthy and abusive relationships, as well as the confidence to recognise when something may not be right.
During Nick’s visit, ITV joined the school to capture the programme in action, speaking to Nick, students and Beaulieu Head Teacher Matthew Burke about why education around healthy relationships is so important.
For Nick, sharing Hollie’s story with young people is deeply personal. Speaking to ITV, he explained how greater awareness of coercive and controlling behaviour could have made a difference to his own family.
“Had I had this knowledge back then, I would have saved Hollie’s life. That’s how powerful it is to learn about these issues.”
The programme at Beaulieu will run for around a year and covers healthy and unhealthy relationships, coercive control, stalking and other abusive behaviours. Students are also being introduced to the Hollie Guard personal safety app.
Encouragingly, students told ITV that even the introduction to the programme had already made them think differently about the relationships they encounter around them and online. The programme will include girls at the school as well as boys who join Beaulieu for Sixth Form.
Nick said:
“When Hollie was killed, one of the things I wanted to do was to prevent the Hollies of the future from happening.”
The Hollie Gazzard Trust would like to thank Matthew Burke and everyone at Beaulieu School for making these important conversations part of school life, and ITV for helping bring the work to a wider audience.
Watch the ITV News coverage and read the full report:
Father of woman killed by ex-boyfriend teaches Jersey students about coercive control | ITV News Channel