SHS in the News

Our Cultural Mix!

SHS Sports Tour to China

Sheffield High School offers many opportunities for its students to travel to all corners of the world, with trips in recent years taking girls to New York City, Thailand, and Peru, Bonaire and the Galapagos Islands, as well as a language development and cultural visits to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, France, Spain and Germany, and annual Concert Band trips to Bruges and Disneyland Paris, to name just a few.

Forging international links, Sheffield High School staff and students have recently returned from a week in China. On this sports tour, (previous trips have included netball and hockey in Australia in 2001 and in New Zealand and Fiji in 2005,) the girls played badminton matches, participated in gymnastics and trampolining coaching sessions and performed displays alongside Chinese students. There was also the opportunity for the group to visit the cities of Beijing and Xi’an and to view Tiananmen Square, the breathtaking Terracotta Army, and the Forbidden City.

Susan Good, a Physical Education teacher at Sheffield High School, said:
“With regards to China I would like to say that everyone should visit – not just as a cultural exercise that alone was unbelievable with one wonder of the world after another – but what stood out for me was the warmth and welcome that was extended to us from everyone we met.”

Sheffield High School also has links with The Benjamin School in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and thirty-one Year 12 students spent a fantastic week on a home stay there in February 2007. As well as shadowing their hosts at school for a day, the girls also visited the city of Miami, a swamp safari park and a local marine life centre, as well as the more obvious excursions to the beach and the mall. The trip was followed up at Easter when sixty-nine Year 8 and 9 girls stopped off at The Benjamin School during their two-week visit to the Orlando theme parks, Miami and Houston, Texas.

In June 2005, Sheffield High School launched a campaign to help the children living in the Bangladeshi village of Jhum Para, a shelter for leprosy sufferers which was established in the 1960s. The school’s decision was a response to the Make Poverty History campaign which aimed to give every child the right to an education, and the initial target was to sponsor twenty children to attend school in Jhum Para. However, within a year this number was exceeded thanks to generous fundraising efforts and Sheffield High School now actually sponsors twenty-eight children and is hoping to significantly increase this total in the near future.

In addition, much closer to home, Sheffield High School prides itself on its diverse cultural mix which provides an environment in which girls from a range of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds work and play happily together on a day-to-day basis. Indeed almost 12% of the school’s pupils have English as their second language and these cover a staggering 38 different languages spoken in family homes! This variety is celebrated in many ways such as assemblies, lessons and tutorial time.

Article written by marketing prefect Cathy Watts.