Refugee week at BBA, running from 16-22 June 2025, has offered a great opportunity for staff and students to continue to raise awareness on the ongoing plight of sanctuary seekers in 2025. The week’s activities were designed on one hand, to celebrate our positive thinking around refugees and asylum seekers within our community, and on the other hand to draw a focus on life as a sanctuary seeker across the UK. Both served the purpose of translating thoughts shared in the classroom into positive actions. This has resulted in compelling arguments to build an even stronger student voice, specifically represented by our School of Sanctuary group and the Student council.
This year, the focus was particularly engaging for our students: ‘Community as a Superpower’. Students were invited to record their ideas on ‘Express Ourselves’ postcards to welcome strategies on the kind of community they would like to see supporting our refugee families. Student drop-ins welcomed at the EAL hub (our bespoke classroom for students who are learning English as an additional language) at lunch and break times meant there was a fair exchange of ideas from students across year groups. It was also an opportunity to share our ‘Community’ display board which expressed the vast experience we have gained with our local, national and international communities through the years.
Within this vision of an effective community network, suggestions from our students were varied and impressive. They ranged from: introducing food banks within school providing appropriate food for all cultures represented at school; ‘roll and stroll’ activities to facilitate friendships between sanctuary and non-sanctuary seekers and making use of the library as a space for talks and speeches relating to topical refugee themes.
Interestingly, students also recommended that we begin to think of new and engaging activities with residents outside the school walls such as: growing plants with and for our refugee community to then cook traditional recipes! Other students were keen to research some of our local charities to set up new links.
Perhaps one of the core strength at BBA is our thoughtfulness and compassion for others and this too was expressed through postcards that read: building a community based on kindness, helping others and fund raising; creating language sharing activities to support inclusivity and designing a project for ‘character matching’ to help new arrivals settle in at BBA. We hope to embrace one or more of these ideas once they have been the subject of further discussion through our very own BBA student council.
