This week saw the annual Come Dine with Me event at one of our Bedford homes. The young people get involved in preparing and serving meals for their peers and staff, and this time it took place outdoors around a fire pit.

The menu included:

Chickpea and lentil curry

Spicy rice

Courgette falafel

served with Moroccan salad and pitta bread

...

Chai tea

The food sounds delicious and I'm sure it was enjoyed by all.

The staff and young people took the opportunity to discuss the importance of community kitchens and how they benefit the homeless and refugee communities. They also discussed the topic of health and safety around the fire pit.

As a follow up to our Safer Internet Week activities, we are appointing Internet Safety Champions in each of our homes to promote online safety and to embed the principles into our everyday practice. We are well aware that young people are increasingly living their lives online and make little distinction between the digital world and real life. This is why we are taking every opportunity to increase our young people's resilience in terms of online safety.

With Safer Internet day coming up on 11 February, our homes and schools have been preparing activities not just for the day itself, but for the whole week in the run up to it.

Check out some of our activities below relating to this important topic:

Our schools will be mirroring these activities to reinforce the messages.

In our Bedford school, we have a member of staff who recently underwent training in ParentZone and we will be doing a series of sessions on this and how we can enable children to stay safe online / digitally. In our Congleton school, all classes will be looking at e-safety as part of PHSE and will be using the CEOP website to look at what information is appropriate to share and what is not.