Charity and
service learning

Charities

Latymer has a proud history of supporting charities and has forged strong links with its local community and organisations as far away as Africa.  Throughout the year, our students enthusiastically participate in a variety of charitable fundraising events, ranging from dodgeball tournaments and bake sales to quiz nights, sky diving and mountain climbing. All fundraising activities are led by students, who also vote to determine which charities to support.  For the 2024-25 academic year, the focus is on homelessness and children, with Shelter England chosen as our national charity and UNICEF as our global charity.

Students also regularly support The Trussel Trust, The Royal British Legion, Save the Children and Comic Relief as well as ad-hoc initiatives such as Wrap Up London and the Barons Court Project. Charity representatives are invited to give talks at assemblies. 

Service learning

Our aim is to incorporate ‘service learning’ into all charity activities at the School. Put simply, we are a school and not a fundraising organisation, so it is the learning that takes place that we believe will have a lasting impact on our society. We hope that it ignites a passion in our pupils and colleagues to learn about social issues and develop compassion and understanding for others. We hope to develop the confidence about what we, as global citizens, can do to contribute to a solution.

We want Latymer students to have an intrinsic motivation to be involved in service learning and for it to become something that is embedded in their mindset that continues once they have left Latymer.

The Latymer Uganda Project

The Latymer Uganda Project was established in 2013 to support educational organisations and charities in Uganda. The society meets weekly to plan and deliver fundraising activities, alongside having correspondence with young people in Uganda. We currently support M Lisada, The Mummy Foundation and Patience Primary School in Kampala, and Soft Power Education, a forward-thinking charity based in Jinja.  The project remains hugely popular with our student and staff community who tirelessly fundraise to support the various initiatives and who visit the country every other year. The Latymer Uganda Project has raised more than £119,000 from non-uniform days, cake sales, sponsored cycle rides, concerts, sponsored skydives, Easter Egg tombola and lots more.

Many families in Uganda simply cannot afford to send their children to school. So, in the spirit of our School’s founder Edward Latymer, who started our school 400 years ago ‘to clothe and educate eight poore boyes’, we decided to use some of the fundraising to sponsor eight children from M-Lisada to go to school each year. M-Lisada stands for ‘Music Life Skills and Deprivation Alleviation’ and it is a youth centre and home for underprivileged adults and children in the Katwe slum. It is always lovely to receive the termly reports and read of their great progress in school and of the impact education has had on their lives.

Some of the other fundraising has gone towards building and renovating classroom blocks at Hidden Treasure Primary School and Patience Primary School and in primary schools in the rural areas around Jinja, which are supported by Soft Power Education. The Mummy Foundation is a centre that supports girls, teenage mothers and women. Our financial support has enabled them to refurbish their building and classrooms, install a solar power system and new toilet block and have adequate medical and educational supplies.

In alternate years our students and staff have visited these organisations in Uganda and have taken part in activities such as teaching lessons to pre-school children, painting classrooms and interacting with the teenagers at M-Lisada and learning from them. The Latymer Uganda Project is a fantastic part of Latymer life, of which Edward Latymer would be proud.