Courageous Advocacy
At Blundeston, we encourage and support our children to be "courageous advocates". This means they champion causes which are special and meaningful to them. These may be global issues or matters far more personal and closer to home.
Global Neighbours
We have embarked on Christian Aid's Global Neighbours programme and have already achieved our bronze award!
We have incorporated global citizenship education into our curriculum and collective worship programme.
We believe this will develop our children's understanding of the wider world and how they can help make it a better place, enabling our children and others to flourish.
Here are some highlights from our bronze award report:
The fullness of life offered through Jesus (John 10:10) is the anchor which allows the school family to prosper and create an atmosphere of mutual respect. Courageous advocacy is seen as an integral part of this vision.
The school curriculum has been revised, ensuring explicit links with global citizenship education across subjects and age groups.
Worship focuses on the school’s vision and values, considering how all can flourish and be given dignity and respect.
Pupils are proactive in establishing opportunities for courageous advocacy.
Pupils are very proactive in sharing their work with their community.
Our Eco Council
Our Eco Council has been very busy making our school a greener and more sustainable place to be! The development of this group was inspired by the Diocese's "Our School: Our World".
So far, our Eco Council has established recycling boxes in every classroom and staff area in the school and the children are responsible for the weekly empyting of these. They also enjoyed a visit to our local recycling centre to find out more about where all our waste goes.
Our Eco Council calculated the number of Christmas cards that would be sent by our school community and decided that they didn't want to generate that much waste! So they wrote to our parents and carers asking them not to send cards, but to donate to charity instead.
Members have quizzed our catering manager to find out how Norse are reducing waste in our school kitchen.
They can also be spotted at playtimes and lunchtimes going round the school and turning off any monitors, interactive boards and lights that have been left on!
A recent addition to our school is our community larder. The children were keen for us to reduce food waste by sharing any unwanted food with other members of our community. The Eco Council approached the PTA to fund the container and have also written to parents and carers explaining why they wanted to set it up. Courageous advocacy in action!
"Stop Palm Oil Club" (SPOC)
Our Year 6 children found out about the environmental impact caused by the use of palm oil in our everyday items. Shocked and angry by this, a a group of children decided to take action and they created the "Stop Palm Oil Club" (or SPOC for short!)
As courageous advocates for the cause, the group have designed their own logo, set up an information display board for the school community, prepared and delivered workshops to each class and led a whole school collective worship about this issue.
The group also decided they needed to engage with decision makers at a national level, so wrote letters to Tesco questioning their use of palm oil and whether they were aware of the impact its use was having. They were delighted to receive a prompt reply.
The campaign continues as they write to other supermarkets and restaurant chains. Watch this space...
Fundraising for Ollie's Heroes
Lexie and her friends organised a charity cake sale to raise money for Ollie's Heroes, a charity in memory of Lexie's older brother.
The children sent a letter to parents, wrote a proposal including costings, designed posters, produced a PowerPoint to share with the whole school, before running a very successful sale! They made a fantastic £286.03 to help children and families facing serious illness.
Christmas Fundraising
During the Christmas period, we collected donations of toys for families at North Denes Primary School in Great Yarmouth. Angela Juler from North Denes was able to come into school to talk to the children about her school.
We also collected donations of food and clothing for homeless people in Lowestoft. These were gratefully received:
"Lost for words...just had all this dropped off from Blundeston Primary School. Tins, crisps, bars, toiletries, hats, toilet rolls, clothing, sleeping bags. Thank you so much, we really do appreciate it. This will really help our soup kitchens and families that are finding things hard. Thank you to the children, families and staff for your generosity".
At our performances, we had bucket collections for two charities. These were the Bone Cancer Research Trust to support one of our families in school and also the Church Urban Fund Raise Your Voices campaign to combat loneliness at Christmas. We raised a magnificent £402 for these two charities!
Donations for Help the Homeless
