On March 19th2019 the school council went to The Big Conversation in St. Teilos church. We spoke about hate crime, asylum seekers, homelessness, drugs and religion. It was a very interesting trip where we voiced our opinions on various topics.
Firstly, we completed a group task to show how our community works. We split into two groups where we each did the team building task. The task was to join hands with another person on the other side of the circle. Once we had done this, we had to try and untangle ourselves out of the huge knot we had made. We did this to represent the community. Some people were given name tags that had things on it such as child, baby and older person. The people who couldn’t get out of the knot were the ones who were left over, meaning they weren’t in the community. This showed us that everyone needed to be included in the community no matter what.
Next, we had a break to give us time to get involved with all the marketplaces who had given up their time to tell us about what they do. As a group, we looked at each marketplace to find out what they did. We collected lots of leaflets to take back to GOFAL so the pupils can look at them if they ever needed to. There were lots of marketplaces such as hate crime, asylum seekers, police officers, drugs and youth clubs. They showed us what makes their job important in the community. We found this very interesting to see as it showed us that every little job makes a difference.
After that, we had a five-minute break and then we moved onto the next task. The next task was about homelessness and how we can help to stop it. Two people had come in to talk to us about their job. They help people who need a roof over their head and help them to get food, shelter, drink etc. We were given different scenario’s where something had happened to make a person homeless. We were asked questions such as: What could the person have done to prevent this from happening? What could we do to help them? As a group, we came up with answers to these questions. Then, we heard what the other schools came up with as well as us. This gave us a chance to respect what the other school’s ideas were.
Furthermore, we then had a twenty-minute break for food and drink. Once that was over, we got given sheets where we had to evaluate our day. We worked as a team to come up with answers for the questions. After we had finished that, we got given a sticker that we could either stick on happy, okay or sad. We did this to show how well our day went. Everybody fromGowerton School decided to put it on the happy face because we all thought the day went extremely well. Then we packed up our things and headed back to School where we told the School Council all we had done in The Big Conversation.
By Isla Bradley, Lewis Hopkins, Ellis Smith and Summer-Grace Thomas
