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Life at LPH was a mixture of quiet industry amongst those preparing for senior school entry and scholarships, rehearsals for our biennial school musical and a buzz of activity around the corridors.
It heralded our annual charity election day when the whole school from Pre School to the staff exercise their democratic right to vote for two charities, one operating nationally and one local to Hove, to be supported during the following year. The children nominated charities, encouraging others to vote for them via presentations in assemblies and their own posters which lined the corridors and classroom doors in the run-up to Election Day. The school library was transformed into a polling station for the day, complete with voting booths, and each class visited to make their selections and post their voting slips into the ballot box. The following morning the School Council acted as count assistants and carefully worked their way through scrutinising the votes. We were delighted to announce the outcome: the school would be supporting Leukaemia Care as the national charity and Martlets Hospice as the local charity.
Hot on the heels of the election, our first fundraising efforts began with the school’s sponsorship, shared with the College, of the Brighton Half Marathon in early March. We fielded a team of staff runners and asked our school community to support one (or both!) of the nominated charities. We also manned a water station on the Half Marathon route and it was good to see so many of our families supporting the event and cheering our runners on. The children are too young to take part in the main Half Marathon, so we organised our own ‘mini mile’ run for all the children in Hove Park Recreation Ground the Friday before so everyone had an opportunity to contribute to the causes. The donations from the mini mile together with our Just Giving pages raised over £2,000, a great addition to our charitable fundraising endeavours this year.
Moving on from running, we turned to reading to raise funds and the Annual Readathon, which ran during the same week as World Book Day. The school challenge was for a total of 30,000 pages to be read at home and the children were sponsored by their families with the funds raised going towards the school charities. They smashed the target with a total of 33,252. It’s pleasing to note that we have a school full of eager readers and bookworms! World Book Day itself brought forward a plethora of fictional character costumes, from fairy tale classics to wizarding greats and rebellious girls, including several of our staff basing their costumes on inspirational women, as International Women’s Day was just around the corner.
We celebrated IWD with a celebration tea in Laurent Hall for our Pre-Prep children and their mummies, which was a lovely event. The children melted hearts all round with their singing which had been carefully rehearsed in the weeks before. Speaking of rehearsals, these came to fruition with our school musical offering. These are staged every two years and this year the show was put on at LPH. Little Shop of Horrors is a wonderful show for our senior pupils to get stuck into and all the hard work they put in, expertly mentored by the Drama and Music Departments, resulted in a super show, full of energy and sassy performances. The star of the show was inevitably the very large Audrey II model, operated and voiced by the children with great gusto. The cast came together impressively to present a thoroughly enjoyable spectacle and a wonderful way to bring the final week of term to an end.
We headed off into the Easter break with the annual ski trip to Italy to look forward to.