Social Impact Update

It has been another busy term for our Social Impact team. In January, we welcomed Gabriel Felder into the department, who is coordinating our vital work, mainly with our local partnership primary and secondary schools.

We also organised another edition of the popular Baking Session, this time recruiting from a very enthusiastic pool of Year 7 students. The event was set up in partnership with La Sainte Union School, who opened up their brilliant food tech space for our bakers. It was very pleasing to see how our girls mixed naturally with the LSU students and worked effortlessly in mixed teams of 2 to 3. Diego and the Channing catering team had all the ingredients ready for a traditional apple crumble, and as the pictorial evidence shows, they turned out beautifully!

We also received a lot of positive feedback from the three primary schools that welcome our Year 12 volunteers to their Wednesday morning breakfast clubs. The children embrace them – in many cases, literally! – and are excited to share activities like jigsaw puzzles, colouring-in, and Snakes & Ladders with older students. The attributes that came up most when we visited the Breakfast Clubs in question were reliable, empathic, patient, and enthusiastic. Two schools even approached us asking whether the volunteering opportunities could be expanded to twice a week, which is the clearest sign of our students doing a fantastic and important job.

This term also saw the successful continuation of Science, Problem Solving, and Minimus clubs. What we noticed again was that all three clubs hit the right balance between meeting the children’s prior knowledge and their natural curiosity to go further and expand the familiar with the new and unexpected. The value we are aiming to add to the visiting students’ experience is palpable, and all clubs are perfect examples of what it means to create an impact, both academically and socially.

We asked 3 children to describe what they think about Science Club:

“We don’t get to do science in school so this is fun. We’re making a volcano at the moment and I also discovered that I like to explode things.”
— Jago, Brookfield Primary School

“It’s really fun, especially when we got to look through microscopes. I never knew you could look at germs and see their inside.”
— Elisheba, St Joseph’s Primary School

“You can use the stuff we learn in everyday life. We always find out new things in science and every Wednesday I learn more.”
— Rhys, Brookfield Primary School

We are thankful for the support of Channing colleagues and volunteers for their engagement with the Social Impact work at the school. We would also like to thank LSU and St. Aloysius’ College for collaborating regarding the use of their facilities to facilitate joint sessions of cooking and D/T.