Gamechangers Case Study: Eltham Hill School
May 2021
Big Ideas was delighted to see 15 students in Year 10 from Eltham Hill School plan and run their own GameChangers project this term, tackling an issue they are passionate about head-on. Students Chenuli & Samiira from the group wrote the following summary of all their amazing social action for the school newsletter:
“In March, some students were given the opportunity to take part in Game Changers, which is a scheme run by the Mayor of London. They worked with us and helped us to decide and run our own social action project. We came to the decision of making our campaign about single parent families. Excited and ready for action, we split off into groups with different roles and met every Wednesday to see how we were all getting on.
Our research team found an incredible charity called Gingerbread. Gingerbread is a charity that helps single parent families by giving advice and support during difficult times. Our presentation and research team made informative assemblies, power points and form time activities to raise awareness and to educate ourselves on single parent families. We organised a guest speaker, Daniel David, who is an ambassador for Gingerbread to speak about his experiences working with the charity and what it was like for him, coming from a single parent family himself.We also decided to raise money by holding a food carousel with tons of different cultural food! We raised just over £350 for Gingerbread.
The fundraising team was amazing: organising meetings with the food tech department to make the food carousel possible. And going out into the community to secure food donations from lots of local businesses including the Co-op.
A huge well done and thank you to all the team.”
Big Ideas had the chance to sit down with Olivia, a member of the group, to talk about the experience of running the project. Olivia said she thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the programme even though ‘chasing people down’ to return forms and for donations was challenging.
Olivia played a key role in the organisation of groups fundraiser encouraging staff to cook dishes from all over the world celebrating the schools diverse community – the carousel included French, Spanish, Mexican, Portugese and African cuisine to name a few. On top of this Olivia, with help from her mum, managed to get donations from local businesses including the Co-op and Mecca Bingo round the corner from the school.
Olivia’s favourite part in the project was getting the chance to communicate with people all across the school. She told us ‘I really liked talking to other year groups, getting everyone involved and getting to know other students as well as talking to staff you wouldn’t usually talk to, getting to know other people within the school.’
The success and scale of the project is clear from the response from the school. Olivia described how students came up to her about the carousel wanting to be involved and the positive response from staff members; ‘Teachers have loved the idea, they have said they’re really proud of us.’
Although the students’ project is drawing to a close we heard from a teacher at Eltham Hill that ‘we have lots of students who would like to run projects such as this one and I’m very hopeful that this project will create a legacy.’
For Olivia in particular this is only the start of her social action journey, when asked if she will be running another social action project she told us ‘100% this event that we have planned is amazing and I’d love to do another one.’