Courageous Advocacy

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.

We believe that being ‘Agents of Change’ 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 Grow and Flourish. 

Opportunities to recognise and engage in courageous advocacy are woven throughout school.  This includes planning within the curriculum (for example within English units – letters to local councillor and interviews with him), expectations of our children to be present in the community and to challenge any wrongs or issues they see.  An example of this is work to reduce the fly tipping outside of our school to improve the environment for the community and local wildlife.

Here are children speaking with MP Dan Tomlinson about various concerns they have, including crime in the local area, road safety and the environment:

Children are caring, active citizens, and the school has established a good relationship with Barnet Council’s grounds development team which has enabled the children to contribute towards planting in the park to benefit local residents. The photograph at the top of this page shows us planting crocus bulbs in our local park. We were very grateful to the Barnet Rotary Club for their kind donation of 2,000 crocus
bulbs which means that the whole community can enjoy these beautiful flowers in the spring time every year.

Annually, we hold a fundraiser in school called One Tree Day, to support reforestation in areas most affected by climate change around the world. So far, we have raised £275 which means that 275 new trees were planted on the island of Madagascar, where only 10% of its original forests remain. It is the 4th largest island in the world and is home to over 250,000 species of plants and animals, most of which (over 80%) do not exist anywhere else on the planet. This reforestation project will help to support local communities to plant and manage forests, offering jobs and making their lives better, whilst protecting the biodiversity that relies on forests to survive.

Another example of our Courageous Advocacy is the work of the hope committee who launched a whole school initiative ‘Hope-anuary’ inspired by our collective worship focus on hope in January 2024. This led to a wave of positive actions that brought hope to the children and to others (including the environment). Feedback was overwhelmingly positive and we have continued with Hopeanuary every January since then.

In November 2023, we had a climate justice exhibition in school as an outcome of our collective worship focus on having a Heart for the Earth. We had 82 posters and many entries for the Christian Aid Climate Justice poster project and 3 of the children’s posters were chosen to display at the Houses of Parliament. Global leaders were invited to view the posters and hear the voice of this generation of children. We invited members of Barnet Council’s sustainability team to come and admire the children’s hard work and also collaborated with East Barnet Secondary School who loaned us their boards to display so many posters!

We have a shared commitment to care for others both inwardly and outwardly. The work of charitable organisations such as Christian Aid, Homeless Action in Barnet, Chipping Barnet Food Bank, Friend in Need (local community group operating from East Barnet Baptist Church), Barnet Age UK are all explored as are the ethics issues around why they need to exist and how we can play our part in combatting this. E.g. climate change and deforestation impact, loneliness, poverty. We arrange food bank donations at Harvest, in Advent, Lent and before the end of the academic year. See the children’s messages of thanks to charity volunteers here. In 2024/25, St. Mary’s was the school who had made the most donations across Barnet to the foodbank. We have learned why foodbanks exist and have had explored the challenging themes of poverty and inequality.

We have good links with Goodwin Court (local care home) and Friend in Need and we visit a few times of the year with the school choir. We recognise that loneliness is big issue for many members of the community and we hope that our singing can help to bring a little cheer to those who need it. 

Children will often hear about charitable causes and will create opportunities to raise funds for them. One such example is our crochet club who busily made and sold creations at various school fayres, donating funds to Cancer Research:

We have developed strong links with the Good Samaritan School for the Deaf in Uganda. We have taken time to learn about one another’s schools, and we are planning to formulate some fundraising for the school with the St Mary’s school community’s support.