Partnerships at St Paul’s Girls’

Creating a brighter future for the community

Partnerships are now firmly established as a part of life at St Paul’s Girls’ School. Not only do these projects allow us to engage with the communities around us in a meaningful way, but they also give our students and staff opportunities to develop their own skills and broaden their experience beyond the confines of our school. The more mutually valuable a project is, the more chance it has to become a longterm success. The fact that we are always overwhelmed with responses from all parts of the school when asking for volunteers shows that pupils value these activities and that younger pupils are just as keen as the older ones.

We are particularly passionate about older pupils mentoring younger ones as this has so many benefits to everyone involved, especially when our pupils are trained. For example, during last year’s ‘Jupiter Project’, a dedicated group of around 15 Paulinas and four staff worked with over 50 primary school children across six workshops, leading to a superb final performance featuring 100 primary pupils playing and singing alongside 25 of our own musicians. This kind of longer-term work is what the best partnerships are all about and I saw first-hand how the confidence of both mentors and mentees developed. This year we have started Primary Hub, which is an ambitious project with 40 Paulinas from Year 10 working with 40 primary pupils weekly throughout the year in a variety of ways, from literacy and numeracy to playing games and reading. It is early days, but you only need to spend a short time in the dining room on a Wednesday evening to see how engaged everyone is in their tasks.

Among our more regular programmes, our students visit local primary schools to teach French, German and Latin, and we welcome secondary schools to SPGS for engineering and coding workshops. We host our annual ‘Living Library’ with neighbouring Year 5 children, and we had nearly 70 students from eight local schools competing in the ‘Panathlon Challenge’ in our Sports Hall, a fantastic sporting opportunity alongside our weekly basketball lessons. We now also have 11 state and independent schools united under the ‘West London Partnership’ umbrella we founded, and we continue to offer dedicated higher education advice. We will open our Careers Forum for the first time to all our partnership schools.

Partnership work can be challenging, but the rewards are broad and deep. We now want to go further and have significant ambitions for the future. The opening of the Rosalind Franklin building, a space for design and innovation, has been designed with partnership use in mind. This will allow us to expand further, alongside a significant investment in staff in the coming years, so that we can maximise the opportunities for our students as well as the communities around us. This is what they are demanding of us, and we look forward to a bright future as a connected part of our community in west London and beyond.

LEIGH O’HARA, Deputy Head and Director of Partnerships

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