This week we celebrated the Independent Schools Council’s Partnerships Week by kicking off our Community Partnerships Programme with this year’s Lower Sixth boys. The aim of the programme is for every boy in the school to have made a meaningful contribution to the community in which we all live by the time he leaves the school. For most of them, that happens through a mutually beneficial partnership with a primary school, charity or other community group during their Lower Sixth year. And importantly, it is not just a one-time visit to play the clarinet, it is a regular, weekly commitment, which builds an ongoing partnership over time.
Boys volunteer suggestions for how they might make a difference and they are matched with groups and organisations who need help. In this way, we ensure that everybody benefits. So far this year, boys have put plans together to run clubs and enrichment activities at local primary schools, such as chess clubs, debating, Latin, creative writing and a huge variety of sports. They are also set to provide academic support by engaging with literacy and numeracy projects with the young pupils they visit. And as well as primary schools, boys are also due to visit local care homes, working closely with local charity Friends for Life, to help combat loneliness. Lower Sixth boys studying the IB are already undertaking their Creativity, Activity and Service strand and have been helping out at local charities (as well as schools and care homes) such as Riding for the Disabled, the Bedford Foodbank and Headway. 
Before they go out and help, it is important that all the boys are prepared and trained to be able to fulfil their roles in the community. To that end, Chris Prior, Master in Charge of Community Partnerships, has been running training sessions in school covering topics such as safeguarding, how to represent the school and top tips for when visiting schools, care homes and other partnership organisations.
Representatives of some of the organisations involved have visited the boys at school, talking to them about the kind of support they are looking for and sharing advice and ideas before the visits begin.
At the end of last year, we celebrated our many primary school partnerships by inviting them all into school for our annual ‘Enrichment Day’. Children from the schools worked together in groups and enjoyed a carousel of enrichment activities, some of which included Shakespearean drama workshops in our Quarry Theatre and ‘A Safari with Sound’ session, which helped the pupils explore what they know about sound, what it is and how we can describe it. One of the sessions was spent in our Music Recital Hall with Music teacher Bjorn Bantock, who led a very loud and exciting percussion session exploring Coldplay’s Viva La Vida where the children played a variety of percussion instruments including Boomwhackers! In another session, pupils also learned some basic Mandarin words, phrases and writing and looked at Chinese culture.
Plans are in place to repeat this next summer, and maybe on an even bigger scale.
Chris Prior explained, “What is so heart-warming about this scheme is that we can not only see just how much our partners are benefitting from the activities, but also how much our boys are learning and maturing from the partnerships. Feedback from the primary school children who attended the enrichment day was genuinely lovely, many of them commenting how they had made friends with our boys and that was their best bit.”
One of our partner primary schools, Goldington Green Primary School, said afterwards, “The services that the Bedford boys have provided have been fantastic. It is lovely to see the children responding well towards older boys.”
Through these mutually beneficial partnerships, boys engage more fully with the world around them and learn about their local town and how to be responsible citizens within it. And as a school community, we are able to help play our part in supporting the good work done by many in Bedford, both educationally and socially.