2022-2023 Anti-Racist Pupil Group
This year in our Anti-Racist Pupil Group we have continued to work on projects that enhance our anti-racist ethos and monitor our shared environments.
This year we had the opportunity to share our work on anti-racism to the Bishop of Barbados and the Bishop of Croydon. We talked about why we each care about anti-racism, and also shared some of our anti-racism group work from this year. The Bishop of Croydon sent through this lovely feedback:
“I am so thankful for our young people and all they contribute to truly helping to make the world a better place.
And that was our feeling when we met the staff and students at Christ Church Purley.
I have been a bit busy since we visited, but we are so thankful for the warmth of the welcome and the passion of their witness to the gospel of love.
What a joy it was to visit and see God’s loving abundance poured out on them, and then through them to all those who they meet.
They are witnesses and apostles already in all they do to spread that message of God’s inclusive love for all people, whatever their unique and diverse identity.
I have already said I am keen for our communications team to use the school as one of the best practice examples of Racial Justice work in the diocese.” Bishop Rosemarie
This year we named some puppets with diverse skin tones to try to represent the different skin colours within our school community. These puppets have been used in collective worship. We chose the names Jazmine, Garrett and Alice.
Some of our group members in year 6 have been monitoring the photos and images that are used by teachers and visiting speakers during our collective worship times. The children’s feedback is that diverse representation in collective worship has continued to improve across the year with greater images with different skin tones, hair textures and cultures. We could still work on including even more images of people from an East Asian background. We also reviewed a collective worship theme using art from different cultures around the world to tell different bible stories.
The children also reviewed our school ethos on anti-racism and explained how they felt our journey towards anti-racism was progressing.
A small group of our children worked together to create a lunch time pledge for the whole school to ensure that all of our children and staff can feel welcome and encouraged to bring their own cultural food to school and to eat it in a way that they would usually at home. They then recorded a video to share with the school.
