Although the theory of these Buddy Benches sounds lovely a similar scheme that operated at my DD�s first school didn�t work well. She found that she would be left waiting, and children who joined her there would be preferentially selected by classmates and taken off to join their games. This made her exclusion all the more obvious and painful.
We found her school had a very naive approach to bullying and were simply incompetent in their handling of subtler forms of it. 2e kids were especially not well supported.
So it may be that a Buddy Bench might work well if properly supervised but there is a real risk that sitting at the bench is seen as an admission of weakness.
(I will add that DD is in high school now and has a good group of friends.)
