All Saints Catholic College, in Dukinfield, has been raising money to help provide more young people with the accessible mental health support they require.

The college has just presented a cheque for £678.78 to the charity MIND. Students took part in many activities to raise the funds as well as a ‘fundraiser day’.

Teacher of RE, teacher coach and staff governor Pamela Bullock, the school’s fundraising leader, said: “We work very hard to support our local community and MIND (the Tameside, Oldham and Glossop branch) are within that community, they also work with pupils from our school so we thought it would be best to raise money to support them.

“We fundraise every term as a school. Our ‘Caritas Ambassadors’ are a group of students who help to organise and put together our charity events.

“They meet with me every week and we come up with different ideas of who we will fundraise for and all the different ways we can go about that as well to make it fun and engaging for all of our pupils.”

She added: “The students came up with their own ideas on how we would raise money for MIND, so it’s very much pupil-led.

“They wanted to do cake sales, they did things like sponsored silences and they also did lots of fundraising in their form classes so any sort of loose change they had in their pockets they would bring it in as well.”

A full day of activities was also put together for pupils too and MIND supplied reflection ideas, puzzles and challenges based on mental health and well-being.

Jason Bromley, senior manager at Tameside, Oldham and Glossop MIND, attended the college to accept the cheque.

He said: “Whenever people fundraise for us it allows us to be really flexible in our mental health offer; a lot of the time as a mental health charity we have contracts with the local authority and the NHS, so our work runs for a finite amount of time.

“Fundraising, however, allows us to adapt and respond to the needs of local communities much more.

“One of the things that we’ve been able to do over the last 12 months is extend our opening hours so we’re now running from 8am until 8pm, rather than 9am until 5pm.

“We also launched a brand new programme of work at the end of last year, specifically supporting young people and their families and co-designed by young people themselves too! A lot of what we do, we wouldn’t be able to do without donations and fundraising."

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