University inspires school children to make a positive social change

Around 100 Northamptonshire primary school children gathered at the University of Northampton this week to present their proposals to improve their school or communities.

UON’s Changemaker Student Award empowers school children to make innovative and positive change in their school community and beyond with the help of the University’s Student Ambassadors who visited schools to help develop their proposals.

Children of all age groups from eight Northants primary schools attended a celebration event at the University’s Waterside Campus on Tuesday 2 July to show off their work.

A team from Eastfield Primary Academy developed a Peace Garden in their school grounds, raised money through a cake sale, gathered ideas from other students and held a competition to design it.

St Lukes CE Primary School decided to run an intergenerational project with the local residential care home and invited elderly residents into the school for a coffee morning and spoke to the visitors about themselves and their experiences growing up.

Charlie Vickers, Special Education Needs Coordinator for Hunsbury Park Primary School said: “Today we’ve been celebrating the work of these wonderful students over the last academic year. They came up with their own ideas, it’s been the best club to run at school because I’ve not had to do anything!

“The children have been leading it the whole way, they’ve been absolutely inspired, so full of ideas, it’s been an absolute pleasure to work with them.

“And today has been the icing on the cake, for them to come to university, they were all really excited to see where they might go in the future, learning about halls of residence and things like that, it was just all really exciting for them, one of them said it’s like a small city!”

To find out more, visit the University’s webpage on Schools Engagement.