Making a Difference
I seem to be spending a lot of time reading and commenting articles in the TES, The Times Educational Supplement. As usual, my comments are in italics. ‘Your pupils are never too young to make a difference’ Sleeping out overnight to raise awareness of homelessness had a profound impact on one school’s staff and pupils By Emma Sturm Last September, three weeks after I had begun working at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh, I attended an assembly for S1-3 pupils. We had a guest speaker, Alice Thompson, co-founder of the Social Bite social enterprise (which has created such a stir by attracting Hollywood stars such as George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio to Edinburgh to support it). She was an inspiring young woman who talked about homelessness. She introduced the idea of "The Wee Sleep Out": thousands of pupils sign up to sleep out – a variation of Social Bite’s "Sleep in the Park", for under-16s who want to do their part to help figh...