Dare to Dream: Year 7 Enquiry Week

Year 7 has had a wonderfully busy 5 days completing Leighton Park’s inaugural Enquiry Week, exploring the topic of Humanitarianism. The week has comprised of a wide variety of cross-curricular activity to help develop creative problem-solving skills, with the overall goal to design or express an answer to the enquiry: ‘What is the best way to make a positive impact on a humanitarian issue or crisis?’

After some initial team building exercises, the Students worked in groups and put themselves in the shoes of a Human Aid Worker, considering what skills and resources they might need to help people affected by a Humanitarian Crisis. The teams explored how they could make the biggest impact to support those impacted, ranging from scientific research to raising awareness.

Each group agreed a Humanitarian Crisis to focus on, these varied from immigration, war and conflict, to access to water and food waste. Within the group, however, individuals could choose how they developed their own response to their chosen topic, which provided impressively varied responses. The end of the week culminated in an Exhibition in the MMC, which saw Presentations and Website designs, as well as Poems, Art, Music, Drama, Film, Dance, Zines, and much more.

Jaden, Year 7, describes how his team tackled the problem of not having access to clean water, “We made a website where people could donate and also find out what is happening around the world to people without water. We also created a film to show what it would be like if you didn’t have water. It’s made me think more about what’s happening around the world.”

Lottie, Year 7, worked on a project about Malaria and reflected, “It was really fun. I got to do lots of fun activities and enjoyed researching different topics.”

One of the highlights of the week had to be an engaging talk from Old Leightonian and former Head of Humanitarian Relief, Nick Guttmann OBE, who shared his experience on managing global crises. During his time at Christian Aid, Nick led  many humanitarian responses including in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Haiti earthquake, and the Ebola crisis and more recently the Covid-19 pandemic in many parts of the world, to minimise the spread of the virus and to mitigate wider effects on lives and livelihoods.

Deputy Head: Academic, Alex Wallace, enthused “Enquiry week is hugely valuable. I think with this focus on humanitarianism is so important to us, in terms of our values of trying to create changemakers of the future. What we hope we’re doing at this young age, is providing them with team-working, flexibility, resilience and problem-solving skills, that they can continue to develop and build on at Leighton Park, so that when they leave here they really are prepared to go on and be changemakers of the future.”