Our Social Responsibility

The Delphic Challenge, an exciting activity and outward bound programme, was launched in 2015. The scheme is made up of four sections, which includes Service.

The Service section of the Delphic Challenge involves volunteering in the local community and giving time to others. Children are free to devise their own plan for how they can give back to others, and recent examples have included: spending time in a care home reading to the elderly; working with our Nursery children; playing music for the community; working at a local arts festival; and fundraising for a charity.

Time Bandits Arts Club is the creation of Judy Seall, a family member at Hallmark Care Home’s Henley Manor. As Head of Drama at a local, independent school, Judy understood that The Arts can build confidence and provide a platform for connection and joy. The aim of the club was to push the boundaries of intergenerational and arts work with people living with dementia by moving away from highly-structured activities. Instead, Time Bandits offered a more flexible and relationship-centred approach in which regular club afternoons encourage creative activities between the same small group of young people and residents. 

Each year our Nursery children and their parents collect food donations for Readifood Refugee Relief. Readifood is Reading's food bank which currently delivers around 120 Emergency Food Parcels every week to families and individuals across the greater Reading area.

Since 2016, the whole Dolphin community has undertaken a Reverse Advent Calendar, bringing in different items every day of Advent up until the end of term and then delivered by our pupils to the Wokingham Foodbank.

Collections also take place at other points during the year for example in recognition of Harvest.

In 2019, Dolphin School donated 57.90 kgs to the Wokingham Foodbank, for which we received a certificate of thanks. This enabled the charity to help local families who, because of a crisis in their lives, could not afford to buy food over the winter period.

Every term, Dolphin children and their parents bring in their used clothing for Bag2School. This initiative helps to protect the environment, by diverting unwanted textiles away from landfill, whilst also raising valuable funds for the school. 

Since November 2016, the school has collected an average of 1,785 kg of clothes and raising an average of £715 a year.  This year we have collected 510 kg of old clothes so far, raising £204.40.

The school are proud members of this local organisation that has worked hard to establish a twinning link with Cuincy in northern France. Representatives from the Modern Foreign Languages staff were on hand to help out during the inaugural visit by the French to sign the official twinning agreement in March 2018.

A leaflet explaining the history and some of the notable sites in Twyford has also been produced in French to help non- English speaking visitors to the town.  This is available in the library in Twyford.

We were also delighted to be able to host a class from the Ecole Joliot Curie from Cuincy on 23rd April 2019.  The French children and Dolphin’s Year 6 pupils took part in an afternoon of activities which encouraged them to work together. They drew each other’s portraits in the Art Room, played team games, learnt how to play netball and all learnt the same song.  The afternoon finished with all of the children singing to assembled parents and members of the Twinning Association and everyone enjoyed an English afternoon tea.

In October 2019 we were also very honoured to be able to welcome the Mayor and his deputy, along with their wives, for a tour of the school.  They were very interested in the many differences between Dolphin and French schools and delighted that we wish to further develop our links.

The school’s gardening Club are members of another local association which allows them to exhibit at the four shows that are held each year in Wokingham.

Small groups of children and some families regularly visit the shows where they are given a very warm welcome by all of the other members.  Dolphin has had a number of successes and we have proudly looked after a number of show cups.  In recent shows it has been great to see staff as well as pupils involved in exhibiting their baking, preserves, craft items as well as plants and flowers.

In addition to this Dolphin staff provide technical support for the Winter talks that the Association run and the talk on hedgehogs was a firm favourite with the children.

This is another local association with which the Gardening Club regularly are involved. We try, every year, to enter the ‘Potato in a bucket’ growing competition and the children enjoy helping out at the prize evening when the weighing and recording of the results takes place.  This is a great opportunity for the children to be involved in local community activities and their enthusiastic attendance is always much appreciated.

In recent years Dolphin has also had a stand at the June Hurst Show and many conversations have been had on our plans for sustainability.  the plastic bottle greenhouse and our work on establishing hedgehog highways locally have been the most engaging of topics. 

Our Social Enterprise enrichment team is encouraged to reflect on their local community and identify issues that they genuinely care about and want to solve. During our weekly sessions, we have discussed the environment, the economy, helping our local area, and many other issues that the children care about. Our aim is to inspire our pupils to create a real-life social enterprise in school, supporting them as they launch their ideas. 

This term, our Social Enterprise group has organised a MacMillan cake sale, where we raised £208 for the well-known charity. They have also made posters to advertise collections for our local Food Bank and led an assembly highlighting the importance of minimising food waste. In the run up to Christmas they were busy creating and organising a Christmas Scavenger Hunt, which was open to all year groups to enter and enjoy before the Christmas holidays. The money raised was added to our annual Charities Fair total and given to a charity of the children's choosing.