Menu
Jessica Tait, Hilden Grange Prep School Head of Religious Studies & Charity Co-Ordinator, explains how her school has used SuperKind to make social action part of its ethos and curriculum.
Our Deputy Head’s three rules, which all the children now know, are to be kind, be kind, and be kind. At Hilden Grange we love being kind to each other so when we heard about The Social Impact Award, we felt it fitted in perfectly with our ethos.
We’ve always raised money for lots of different charities but recently we’ve been thinking more deeply about how we approach fundraising, introducing a more considered approach that extends beyond traditional school fundraising methods of putting a pound in a bucket. We feel this is really important to developing the child as a whole, beyond academic achievements, and helping foster essential skills and values such as empathy, passion, curiosity.
We are delighted to have found a platform through which we can not only reward students (and ultimate whole school efforts!) for taking actions to make the world a better place but also access heaps of educational resources to help us think about the world around us and what we can do to help.
How have you delivered the Social Impact Schools Award at your school?
I invited all Form Tutors to our school SuperKind account so that they could access resources, set up fundraising campaigns, and log badges.
From there I encouraged Form Tutors to use SuperKind in Tutor Time (a weekly lesson where Tutors spend time with their children). Often this lesson will feature debates and discussions around important current problems and it’s been fantastic to have a platform to support these discussions.
Their involvement with SuperKind has grown from strength to strength, from watching the change-maker videos and discussing how they can make a difference, to making posters about good hand hygiene using the ‘Good Health and Well-Being’ page on SuperKind, to starting a litter picking club. Our Tutors and students have become increasingly comfortable with SuperKind and the feedback has been that the website has been really easy to navigate and find things to do.
Have you got any feedback on your experiences using SuperKind?
SuperKind has been such a great resource to bring the children together and help them discover, enjoy, and find out what they can be doing to help others around the world. It has helped us think more deeply about how we can embed social action into everyday life at school, rather than one-off trips and fundraisers. The resources have provided a framework and structure through which we have been able to think more proactively about how to embed social action into our curricular offer and lesson times.
It's been amazing to see our students start to look outside themselves and show interest and care for other people..."
It’s been amazing to see our students start to look outside themselves and show interest and care for other people. I’m endlessly taken aback by how amazingly empathetic our students are and how passionate they are about making a difference. They are forever looking for more ways to spread kindness, and while this was originally in part motivated by SuperKind badges, I see this becoming second nature to the pupils now.
It’s a real pleasure to have a formal system through which we can reward social action and kindness and it serves as a powerful antidote to disciplining behaviour.
