Mulberry attended across four days of the festival: the Southbank Schools Day on Wednesday 8th March; and the WOW Weekend from Friday 10th to Sunday 12th March. 65 girls attended in total, representing years 8-13. During the Southbank Schools Day, students attended workshops on fitness and self-empowerment, and on challenging gender stereotypes. Across the WOW weekend, Mulberry students attended talks, debates, panel discussions and workshops. They listened to world-class speakers on subjects including racism, socio-economic inequality, politics, activism, inspiring women throughout history, women’s health and science.

For the seventh year in a row, we had a fantastic range of student speakers taking part in various panel events across the weekend. Ayesha Begum and Abida Sultana in Year 12 hosted a ‘WOWBite’ session, in which four speakers led 15 minute talks on their own area of expertise; Ayesha later spoke on a ‘WOWDen’ panel, helping to judge a range of ideas to improve the lives of women and girls, submitted by members of the public. Mahreen Chaiwalla and Nisha Akhtar in Year 10 also hosted a range of WOWBite talks; and our fantastic Year 9 Magic Me group gave a performance of Decorum to an audience of hundreds at the Riverside Terrace.

We would like to thank the Southbank Centre for making us a part of this important festival, and giving our girls a platform from which to raise their voices for change.

During the day on 16th February, Mulberry students put together a tour of the East End designed to give Tina a flavour of local history and culture. Promee Reza, Ayesha Begum, Elizabeth Todd and Samilah Naira led the tour. We began with a walk from Liverpool Street to Spitalfields market, followed by a visit to Commercial Street and then Brick Lane. On the journey between locations, students told Ms Tchen about the rich history of the area, from the history of Spitalfields market originating in the thirteenth century alongside St Mary’s Hospital and Priory, to the immigrant communities who have made Brick Lane their home since the 1600s – from French Huguenots, to European Jewish communities, to Bangladeshi families, many of whom are the ancestors of current Mulberry students. 

Our tour of Brick Lane included a salt beef beigel from the famous Brick Lane beigel shop, Beigal Bake, and a tour of the Jamme Masjid mosque, formerly the Great Synagogue (and before that, a church). We also stopped off at Rough Trade, where we gifted Tina a book about the rich history of East London, and squeezed into the photo booth together to capture the moment.

Later that evening, Tina joined us at the Royal Society of Arts, where she delivered our second annual education lecture. The annual education lecture, inaugurated by Jude Kelly in 2016, provides an opportunity for our school community, our partners and our supporters to come together to discuss the current global context of education for girls and young women. The lecture is delivered each year by an expert speaker. 

Tina Tchen spoke eloquently about the background and context of Michelle Obama’s visit to Mulberry for the UK launch of the Let Girls Learn campaign in June 2015. She told us about how the campaign was first created, and the work it has done thus far to ensure every girl around the world can go to school. Her talk placed great emphasis upon the value of educating girls – not just because an educated girl improves the overall health, wealth and wellbeing of her family, community and wider society, but because girls are valuable human beings who deserve every opportunity to develop their full potential. Ms Tchen also gave us some insights into life under the Obama administration, speaking movingly about the wit, warmth and passion of Barack and Michelle Obama, and the work both the President and the First Lady did to reach out to, support and empower marginalised communities – from girls around the world, to LGBTQ people, to children growing up in poverty. 

After the lecture, Tina joined us for networking and canapes, spending time talking to our students and students from our partner schools.

We cannot thank Tina Tchen enough for her continued support of Mulberry. In every interaction with our students and our wider community, she is fully present, engaging and inspiring. Her commitment to public service and empowering women and girls is deeply encouraging at a time of great global uncertainty, and continues to inspire our students to take action on behalf of girls’ education.

 

 

The Rights of the Child

Our MulberryTalks programme was relaunched for this academic year on Wednesday November 30th, led by guest speaker Ruth-Anne Lenga, Head of Academic Programmes at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education.

MulberryTalks are interactive seminars designed to bring our school community together in lively intellectual debate. Speakers give a presentation on a topic of their choice, followed by a Q&A session in which students and staff alike are encouraged to participate as actively as possible.

Ruth-Anne Lenga gave a fascinatingpresentation of the life of Dr JanuszKorczak. Korczak is widely recognised asa pioneer of children’s rights. He ran anorphanage in Poland in the early twentiethcentury where his charges were treatedwith the utmost respect and kindness:Korczak placed the rights of the child at the forefront of his practice, drawing up a set of principles which recognised a child’s right to dignity, respect, love and fairness. He instituted a children’s court run by children at his orphanage, where their peers and the adults entrusted with their care could be brought to trial in the event of an injustice. He had a visionary perspective on children who misbehaved or engaged in antisocial or delinquent behaviour, insisting that no child should be branded a lost cause on the basis of his actions. In particular, he recognised a child’s right to be treated with respect, and said that children ‘are not people of tomorrow, but people of today’: a child is valuable, important, and worthy of respect and dignity at all times, not just when they reach adulthood. When the Nazis invaded Poland during the Second World War, and the orphanage was relocated to the Jewish ghetto, Korczak worked against appalling conditions to ensure that the children in his care had their basic needs provided for as far as was possible, and continued to be treated with love and kindness. Despite efforts by his supporters to rescue him from transportation to the Nazi death camps, Korczak refused to leave his children, and was eventually taken to his death in the gas chambers with 250 orphans. Ruth-Anne Lenga traced the legacy of Korczak’s vision to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is underpinned by many of the principles Korczak first articulated. She also showed how Korczak’s principles have influenced the most progressive modern thinking on teaching and caring for children, relating this directly to the kind of teaching and learning we practise at Mulberry. As our Citizenship students begin learning about human rights, and our MUN delegates prepare to debate the treatment of refugee children at the Safe, Sustainable Seas conference, this year’s inaugural MulberryTalk was a rich resource indeed. We would like to thank Ruth-Anne Lenga and the Holocaust Education Centre at UCL for a wonderful start to this year’s MulberryTalks programme.