Educate and Celebrate at Copeland Road Primary School

The Equality Act 2010 has created the ‘Public Sector Equality Duty’, which states that every public body, including schools and academies, have legal duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between people who share and do not share the following protected characteristics:

• race
• disability
• gender
• age
• religion or belief
• sexual orientation
• pregnancy & maternity
• gender identity
• marriage and civil partnership

Assisting schools and academies to comply with this legal duty, ‘Educate & Celebrate’ is a national initiative designed to prepare children and young people for life and to give them a good understanding of how Equality and Diversity is protected by the Equality Act 2010.

The approaches used in ‘Educate and Celebrate’ have been recognised by Ofsted as best practice for taking a whole school approach to teaching equality.  We have embedded the ‘Educate and Celebrate’ programme into our curriculum. The programme provides positive relationships and understanding. It is based around a set of stories about different families, relationships and gender identities.  We are currently working towards achieving the Gold Award for Educate and Celebrate Best Practice Status.

We attended the Educate and Celebrate Durham final Bake Off on Monday 11th February. We had 3 hours to bake and decorate our cake around the theme of peace, activism and reconciliation. The judges were Miss Tess and Jaff from The Futureheads. Even though we didn’t win, Sophie and Macey had a brilliant day and enjoyed themselves.

Choose Respect

It has been Anti-Bullying Week with the theme of ‘Choose Respect’. We ran a cake design competition that was won by Sophie. She has then turned her design into reality (with help from Miss Houghton and Macey!) so we could enter the Educate and Celebrate Bake-a-thon. Fingers crossed for our entry.