EDI Week: 'Celebrating Difference'

Our vision for Forest School is to truly be an inclusive environment where pupils, members of staff and parents/carers feel they belong, are valued and listened to. We are committed to building upon the real diversity that exists in our community by ensuring that everyone feels safe and confident at the school in order to achieve their personal aspirations. Forest School is dedicated to securing best outcomes for all.

Throughout Monday 5th-Friday 9th February, we were delighted to be spotlighting equality, diversity and inclusion at Forest School with a number of events throughout the week. This year, we focused on ‘Celebrating Difference’ across the Pre-Prep, Prep and Senior School throughout the week.

Some of the activities that we saw take place in different subjects areas:

Chapel

Chapel will be led by a mixture of Guy’s House pupils and Faith & Belief Advocates, looking at artefacts that represent their individual faith, belief and identity and celebrating these differences as a community. Year 9 will focus on the life and work of Wangari Maathai to tie in with their Geography focus and will reflect on how her indigenous spiritual beliefs (Kikuyu) informed her life and work around ecology. We will also have a variety of musicians sharing throughout the week, celebrating differences in faith and belief through music. On Thursday evening a selection of pupils will attend the Youth Summit at LSE on Faith & Climate for a Sustainable Future, drawing together our shared values around sustainability and being inspired by the different ways this is expressed and actions taken.

Design and Technology

Pupils we will be exploring EDI through a focused practical activity. We will be designing and making keyrings and fashion accessories from ‘Hama Beads’ and Acrylic pieces, our pupils will be encouraged to express as they wish, ensuring it is related to EDI, options are vast and inclusive and may include: LGBTQ+, Identity, Culture, Disability, Country flags, etc.

Forest Futures

During the week, we were pleased to welcome Zion Sengulay to deliver a presentation on the various apprenticeship opportunities at Deloitte. We will also be joined by Ishani Chandrasekara who will deliver a presentation on degree apprenticeships in software engineering at Queen Mary University.

House Song

An opportunity for our pupils – Y7 – Y13 inclusive – to work collaboratively to learn and perform a song as a House. All song choices will reflect this year’s EDI theme: Celebrating Difference.

Throughout the course of the day, our houses focused on personal development, based on the following skills:

• Collaboration within the house and how this event allowed all year groups to work together
• Leadership skills that were used and developed during the workshops
• Responsibility and problem solving – how they dealt with any issues they might have run into
• Creativity within the team
• Communication

Congratulations to Franklin (girls) and Millers (boys) who won yesterday’s big event. Our judges were incredibly impressed by the sense of community and teamwork during the whole day. Well done to everyone!

https://www.instagram.com/p/C3sle5eILIR/

Girls’ Public Speaking

Excellent speeches from our Girls House Public Speaking final this morning! Well done to our final four – Prisha (Kingsley), Alice (Hepworth), Hope (Baylis) and Maha (Astell) with BAYLIS taking the lead on this one.

“If we don’t make a change, then who will.”

Boy’s House Meetings

Meanwhile, the Boys Houses discussed why EDI is important…

Prep EDI

Prep School pupils were treated to a visit from Laura Mucha for our EDI day that week. Laura is an author of several books and poems and is also and Old Forester! Laura gave assemblies to the Pre-Prep and Prep pupils on celebrations around the world which were the basis of her book: Celebrate! The assemblies were packed with stories, props and information about different celebrations from around the world. For the rest of the day, pupils were involved in sessions based on the theme of celebrating difference including world cooking, researching ingredients, P4C and stories and discussion from our Faith & Belief advocates. Years 3 to 6 were also involved in a poetry writing workshop with Laura.

Fusion

Fusion is a long-established fixture in Forest’s performing arts calendar. Through dance, drama, spoken word and music students celebrate the diversity of cultures at Forest. It’s a fun event, full of heart and humour, and – importantly – is student led. As ever, Fusion will raise money for charity.

Our hosts for the night, Will and Sofia also did an amazing job throughout the show!

Senior School Celebrating Difference Day

A non-uniform day, with a difference. We are inviting all pupils, senior school teaching staff and non-teaching staff to wear something that is important to them in terms of their identity so we can ‘celebrate difference at Forest School.

During  EDI Week, we asked our students and staff ‘what celebrating difference means to them?’ and ‘why EDI is important?’ and these are some of the responses we got:

“EDI is super important as it’s a way of us expressing who we are, where we come from and how we identify. All of our cultures are so bright and beautiful!”

Workshop

Thank you to Every Future Foundation for coming down to Forest and conducting a Year 8 had a workshop on Anti-Racism and Allyship.

It’s been a great week for our students, exploring different cultures and learning from each other!