15 March 2019
Over the course of the last year, two of our Year 9 students have represented Chorlton High School on a University of Manchester project called ‘Diversity Champions’. This is a project set up by the university in response to the rise in hate crime recorded after the Manchester Arena attack in May 2017. Throughout the course of the year, Zak Gardner and Aleeza Ahmad have taken part in a number of training events around different aspects of diversity such as mental health, race and religion and LGBT rights. They ran a diversity day in school, running workshops for a number of Year 7 students. They, along with Miss Slinger, Teacher of Geography, also took part in a study tour to Krakow in Poland around Holocaust education. This included a visit to Auschwitz to witness the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish people.
At the end of the first year of the project, each of the Champions and Miss Slinger have received ‘Outstanding Contribution’ awards in recognition of their work and support for the project. They were all invited to the Houses of Parliament in March, where they spoke about their experiences and the impact of the project at an event held by the Polish Embassy, focussing on their time in Poland and at Auschwitz.
We have now begun the second year of the project with the university and recently recruited two new Year 9 champions. We are excited to see the project grow and develop further, building on our community and diversity work in school.
