It has been a very busy term for the Informal Jewish Education department, starting by welcoming in the New Year with our honey and bees sale and display. Succot was the perfect opportunity to launch our school charities with our very popular ‘Shwarma in the Succah’ event. We welcomed representatives from all 3 of the school’s chosen charities for the year who spoke to students about the charities and started the ball rolling with ideas for fundraising. This year’s charities are Secondary First, Keshet and Make a Wish Foundation Israel.
We also launched our faith twinning programme and are very excited to announce that we have 4 faith schools with whom we are partnering this year and will have Muslim, Hindu and Christian interfaith twinning events throughout the year. In addition, ten Year 10 students will also be joining the Alan Senitt Interfaith Leadership programme where they will be working together with students from other faith and non-faith schools to plan and deliver community programmes during the year.
Year 7 and 8 have also launched their volunteering programmes. Year 7 have all been introduced to the Yoni Jesner Award and many of them are well on their way to gaining the 20 hours of volunteering necessary to qualify for the award. Year 8 have started on their year-long project in which every student will spend an hour volunteering in our local community, either at Livingstone Primary or at Jewish Care’s Southgate Connect day centre.
We were excited this year to welcome representatives from all the Zionist Youth Movements into school, to meet this year’s movement workers and to discuss with them their activities at JCoSS over the year. We are the only Jewish secondary school who welcomes all the movements into school and we are looking forward to some exciting projects coming up this year.
A large number of other visitors also came to school this term for Rosh Chodesh. We marked the start of the new month by welcoming speakers who came to run educational sessions for all our KS3 students. This month’s speakers included Jewish Womens Aid, BBYO, FZY, Keshet, myIsrael, Noam, RSY NEtzer, The Together Plan, World Jewish Relief and Yachad.
Finally, the JCoSS Leadership Academy has launched, with 36 Year 12 students who have applied to join the Academy. They have chosen to participate in one of 3 pathways over the year – Community Leadership, Jewish Education and Social Action. All the sessions are being run by experts and professionals in these fields and the students are benefiting from a high level course plus, networking, work experience and project management opportunities. Watch this space for updates on their progress over the year.