The Elliot Foundation: Schools at the heart of communities

No organisation exists in isolation and indeed, many thousands of us get up every morning facing the same challenge. How are we going to make a genuine difference to the communities that we serve?   

The Elliot Foundation is a charitable schools trust with 36 primary schools in the West Midlands, London and East Anglia serving approximately 15,000 children. But we've learned that our responsibility to those children and their families doesn't stop at the school gate.

So we have approximately 40 different nationalities represented here at Highlees Primary School in Peterborough. Very culturally diverse part of the UK. We just really want to be able to support them where we can financially or in any other way. Education. However, we can help them.

One morning when I was unlocking the gates, I noticed that we had a year six boy here quite early. I got to speak to him. Found out from him that he’d travelled to school by two buses. It was cold. So I brought him inside, got him in the warmth.

But after chatting to him, I found out that he was diabetic, but he hadn't had any medical attention. So I got him sorted and then I reported it to safeguard in the school so the school could look after him.

It was after Matt's initial conversation with the family when that was reported that the investigations took place and relationships were built with the family. We soon discovered that Mum was quite hesitant, reluctant to seek support. She thought there would be a cost. She was worried about what would happen next. She didn't understand the systems. Through the trust that Matt built with the family, that meant she got the support she needed in the end.

So that one interaction sparked something much bigger. We started our Community Box Programme, which is weekly boxes of food hygiene products, cleaning products, ect. that's for our most vulnerable families.
That now operates in 23 of our schools, has given out over 150,000 boxes since the scheme began. That's approximately 5 million pounds worth of benefit-in-kind. 

Parents will sometimes just come past. Give me a hug and off they’ll go again because they know they can come here. They know they can come. They can have a coffee.

They can ask us for a food bank to be picked up on a different day, not in front of everybody else. If they feel a bit anxious about that. 

They come in here as strangers and they leave here as like a family. It is really nice. We all help each other. Like if they want a quick coffee, five minute coffee it’s not easy sometimes being a parent.

I absolutely despise anything healthy. I do not like vegetables, but I still say it's important for you. I do not really know how the human body works, but I think it's, it like improves your immune system and that apparently protects your body from getting sick. If health didn't exist, I would eat chocolate and donuts all day.

The Elliot Foundation proves that schools don’t just educate. They anchor communities together. 
The creation of these local spaces where people feel comfortable asking for support are vital for creating real, lasting change.

With many children having English as an additional language, we work together to support the children with developing those literacy skills, but also their wider families as well.

We provide approximately 50 boxes, foodbank boxes a week to our families here at Highlees.

So Rackets Cubed and Fareshare do a delivery here. Every Monday we have a refrigerated van that will appear. We don't know what time, so it’s a bit of a surprise for us. And they’ll send me a list of what is on that.

We also do approximately 7 or 8 collections now a week in conjunction with Neighbourly. So local supermarkets, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, Lidl provide surplus food for us and we’ll go and collect it. But this is for everybody. This is not just for Highlees families, this is for the wider community. So anybody who’s passing, anyone who needs it, we advertise it out on social media. 

Well, we’re actively seeking partners who can help us positively impact communities. 

It doesn't matter which sector you’re in, finance, technology, IT. If you share our values and commitment to making society a little bit better. Please get in touch.

So we’re rolling out community hubs nationally. These are dedicated spaces within schools that we let for free and that allows third party organisations to provide services to their local communities, whether that’s to tackle poverty, health issues, loneliness or any other social ill. 

When a school like Highlees becomes a true community hub, it doesn’t just educate its children, it strengthens and rebuilds the community that surrounds it. 

It demonstrates what you can achieve if you just believe in people, and that when we bring people together, we can do so much more than we can on our own.