My Freedom Day 2025

My Freedom Day is an annual event which aims to raise awareness of the amount of child labour which still exists in the world today.

We learned about the lives of children the same age as our pupils, who spend 12 or more hours a day working, with no opportunity to go to school and improve their lives with education.

During the project, we had competitions with events based on some of the safer jobs carried out by children. They carried water around the obstacles on the playground, cut paper in the shape of shirts and glued on ‚buttons‘, peeled potatoes in a timed race and tried to estimate how many books in our library weighed the same as bricks which are made and carried by children in some parts of the world.

At the end of the day, we gathered all the times, quality of work and accuracy of weights estimated and translated them into points. These points were converted into ‚money‘ for the children, at the levels paid for a 12 hour day to real children somewhere in the world. Most of our pupils were shocked to find out that they would earn barely enough to buy a cheap takeaway meal from a fast food restaurant in our local shopping centre.