IN support of the 2021 Comic Relief campaign, in the last week of March, students at Dyson Perrins Church of England Academy took part in an inter-house Challenge to raise awareness and money for the charity.

As well as supporting this important charity, the challenge was also used as an opportunity to further enhance the school’s community connections and encourage team building amongst the pupils.

The week of challenges was based on the Comic Relief theme, ‘The Power of Funny’, and the charity’s mission statement for 2021: "It has never felt more important to have some fun and raise money to support people living incredibly tough lives. We need the power of funny to turn laughs into lasting change."

Over the course of the week, each house at the school was asked to organise and take part in events which everyone was given the chance to enjoy.

Pupils took part in ‘Codebreaker’ exercises and quizzes, tackled Maths problems in teams and wrote funny poems to entertain each other and win points for their house.

One Year 8 student told how they particularly enjoyed the Codebreaker exercises, explaining: "My favourite challenge was the codebreaker because we were only allowed to use our art skills to see if we could guide our team through a maze.

"Having to work through this as a team was such fun – it meant we learnt a lot more about each other and laughed a lot, even when things went completely wrong!”

Speaking about the success of the inter-house challenge week, Fred Dowdeswell, business manager at Dyson Perrins, said: "We are extremely proud of the way our students threw themselves into the week, demonstrating our school values of challenge, resilience, belief and trust, whilst working with enthusiasm in their house teams to complete the challenges.

"Well done to everyone who took part and huge congratulations to our winning house, Morgan.

"Special thanks must also go to our brilliant pastoral team and charity committee, who worked so hard to make this event such a success.

"While money is still coming in for the charity and we excitedly await confirmation of the final total raised, we can all reflect on the huge amount of good work done and the enormous amount of laughter that was to be heard around the school all week."