On Monday 15th October, a group of pupils from Year 9 made their way to the North Kesteven District Council
Offices to take part in Local Democracy Week. Each year SWRA are invitedwith other schools from the region to participate in this event hosted by, and in the chambers of, the district councillors. The pupils are given the opportunity to get involved with some of the services offered by the local council and this year’s theme was on the subject of environmental health. Pupils were to work with the council Environmental Health Team and to carry out their own investigations into getting to the source of outbreaks of illnesses such as those caused by Ecoli O1571. Pupils were split into groups to work with Health Officers from the council or local hospitals and to get an insight into what challenges they might face in an average day. Dealing with reports of illness, applications for licenses and lab reports on samples seems to be all in a day’s work for an EHO. There was some real eye opening information about how easy it is to catch any one of a number of common illnesses that environmental health officers deal with such as Listeria and Salmonella, and by the time we stopped for lunch there was not much of an appetite, especially for the egg sandwiches!

The second part of the afternoon involved taking part in ballot elections and using voting pads for a series of questions about environmental health in general. The afternoon ended with the environmental health team re enacting the scene from a restaurant that had caused an outbreak of Ecoli, and showed us all the steps that had to be taken in getting to the origin of an outbreak and what to do once it had been located. All the pupils came away pleasantly surprised at how fun and informative the trip had been and a massive thanks goes to NKDC for laying on the event. It will be interesting to see how the lessons learnt will be brought back to have an impact on how the pupils go about their cooking and preparing of food both in and out of school!

SWRA can be proud of our pupils and the particularly high praise we received from the local councillors who went out of their way to compliment the enthusiasm and application shown by pupils of SWRA, above and beyond that of other schools. Particular praise went to Frankie Goodge who kept Mrs Bond in line and drove her team forward. As for me, I would like to pass on some of the good general advice we learnt from the day- wash hands and food thoroughly, do not mix raw and cooked meat or things they touch and always cook food thoroughly all the way through before eating! (trust me we studied the results- they are not pleasant!)