Charity & Community
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FHS Regent’s Park is proud to support a number of local and national charities alongside its strong partnerships with local schools in London and the Rainbow Centre in Sri Lanka.
Charity fundraising is a big part of school life and girls are encouraged to volunteer their time and enthusiasm to raise money for a variety of important causes.
The Help Fund is a student-led club which involves pupils throughout the school in fundraising. The President of the Help Fund (an elected Sixth Form role) oversees the running of the club and generates ideas for community fundraising. Each form has a charity representative who helps to promote and organise the charity events.
A charitable highlight of the year is the annual sponsored walk. Dressed in a distinctive fancy dress theme, each year group descends on neighbouring Regent’s Park to walk (or run) as many laps as possible in an afternoon. Prizes for the best costume and best dressed dog(!) see the FHS community go all out – our most recent walk raised over £25,000 for the Help Fund’s chosen charity.
Other fundraising endeavours include:
- House Charity Fairs
- Pre-Loved Clothes Sales
- Charity Discos
- Lip Sync Competitions
- Dance Battles
- Themed Quizzes
- Mufti Days
As well as fundraising for a number of local charities, we also support the Rainbow Centre in Sri Lanka to which we have a longstanding relationship. Established by an FHS parent, the Rainbow Centre works to provide vulnerable children with nutritious food, welfare, education and medical assistance.
FHS has strong links with a number of local state school partners and altogether is involved in over 20 outreach programmes.
One of our strongest partnerships is with St Marylebone School, where FHS teachers teach Latin, free of charge, to students from Year 8 up to A Level. Kat Pugh, Head of St Marylebone, has commented: “Francis Holland’s provision of subject specialist Latin lessons to our students has been a tremendous success. Not only has this terrific curriculum offer kept alive an otherwise fading subject in state education, it has developed our students’ scholarship, commitment and academic confidence.” This initiative has inspired us to host an annual Classics Symposium for over 100 pupils from schools all over London and the South East.
Many of our departments also host events to which local schools are invited. Recent examples include the ‘We Do Physics’ A Level Symposium in collaboration with KCL Womxn in Physics (to which St Marylebone School and Camden School for Girls were invited) and a German conference day where pupils from local secondary schools heard from leading Russell Group University lecturers and took part in collaborative workshops.
The Music Department is part of the Voces8 programme and a number of our Sixth Form music students train as Young Leaders – visiting a local primary school and teaching songs to the children.
Alongside St Marylebone School, King Solomon Academy and All Saints Catholic College, we have held two pioneering conferences, attended by Heads from all over the country: ‘Widening Access to Highly-Selective Universities’ and ‘“Teachers like me” Building an Ethnically Diverse Staff Room’. Students from these schools also attend our ‘Aspiring to Oxbridge’ events.
Volunteering in the local community is part of the core principles of the Sixth Form at FHS. Sixth Form pupils are encouraged to seek their own placements and develop their own strengths and interests.
Many of our volunteers visit Swiss Cottage School, where they work with staff to help children with special educational needs. At Feathers Youth Club, our students help to run the after-school homework club whilst at St. Edward’s, St. George’s and St. Christina’s Primary schools our students help with reading and activity time with pupils once a week.
With the help of the Art Department, Sixth Form student volunteers have run a mosaic club for the elderly for the last few years.
