Courageous Advocacy

What is Courageous Advocacy?

Children and Young People are integral to building a fairer and more sustainable world for everyone. Courageous Advocacy equips them with the skills, tools, confidence, and opportunity to speak up and take action on issues of justice. Courageous Advocacy is an integral part of the Church of England Education Office’s vision for education.

Our commitment at St James is to support our children and young people to use their agency with autonomy and freedom on the issues they care about.

Courageous advocacy , which we instil in our pupils, enables our school community to develop a greater awareness of the challenges others face in life and how they, as individuals, can support causes and make a difference in our school community, local community and further afield.

We aim to support a wide number of charities, charities chosen by the children, locally, nationally and globally through fundraising events organised by the staff, school council, different year classes or groups of pupils.

So what have we done this year?

Last year, 2 members of our staff – Miss Sampson and Miss Drake took part in an completed the London Marathon and as part of this they decided to take part in the ‘London Mini-Marathon’ event organised by TCS London Marathon.

The event was launched by the school council at a whole school assembly and the decision was made that it would be a sponsored event. The school council wanted to raise money to support children and families overseas who were suffering and in poverty. It was decided that any money raised would go to Christian Aid.

The children had to run 2.6miles, which we worked out was 26 laps of our school field. Parents were invited into school over the course of the week to support their children as they took part in the event.

As a school we managed to raise £1201.90 for Christian Aid and the vital work they do.

The children also received pin-badges for completing their individual mini-marathons.