At St Margaret’s Primary Academy, we are passionate and dedicated to support all our families. With the increasing pressures and strain put on our local food banks, it has become a regular practise for us to source food from within our school community and local community to support our families. In the Autumn term of 2023, our Lord Major opened our school Hub to all our families in the school community. Please visit our Hub page for more information.

Christmas

As a trust, we launched the twelve days of Christmas food bank. We were overwhelmed with the support we had from within the school community, including members of staff and managed to drop Christmas hampers to some of our most vulnerable families. The hampers included essential food, Christmas treats and paraphernalia to reduce the added pressures over the Christmas break.

We contacted shops in the community and beauty representatives to help us put together Christmas beauty hampers for both mums and dads in varying vulnerable home situations. The children came together with their siblings to choose a variety of beauty products and made hampers to put under the tree for their parent. One very overwhelmed mum tearfully shared, ‘This has really touched me as I was not going to have anything under our Christmas tree from anyone.’

Making Links with our Community

In the past, we have teamed up with our local Morrison's store, who kindly donated pizza kits over half term and provided us with toiletries and food to make up our own food hampers. Special half term pizza deliveries were made to families and food hampers have been delivered to families across the school community. 

Our local Lowestoft Tesco store continue to support our Community Hub, delivering food produce towards our on site food bank. Our food bank is open daily to our school community before and after school for all our families to access.

Rapid Relief Team

In 2022, we delivered additional food boxes to some of our families within the school community. These food boxes came from the Rapid Relief Team (RRT). The RRT do not receive government funding, they rely solely on sponsors. They serve people across the globe with teams in Australia, the United Kingdom, North and South America, the Caribbean, Canada, New Zealand and across Europe.

We are grateful they supplied us with food boxes to distribute across the school community and we were able to deliver all the boxes in two days to family homes. The boxes have been gratefully received and will look forward to working with the Rapid Relief Team in the future.