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6th November, 2020

Achieving your award during the COVID-19 pandemic

We are living in a time where global learning is more important than ever, so we want to support you to give your students global learning opportunities in the most efficient and manageable way.

Following teacher feedback, we have decided to make some temporary changes to the award to support schools further in the coming months. We are now offering schools the option to defer their award application by six months. 

In order to defer your award, you need to login to your Fairtrade School account and click to ‘Request to defer your next application by 6 months’.

We have also made changes to each of the awards to help support you further with your application: 

FairAware

We’re aware it may be difficult for schools to conduct a Learner Audit at present and so if that is the case then please select ‘Unable to complete’ from the drop down menu for the Learner Audit on the online form and this will give you the option to not complete it on this occasion. Please see below for how the form will look:

For the ‘Learning Challenge’, we have created lots of Home Learning Challenges which have been designed for children to access at home and can be used for this section of your award.

FairActive

It may be more challenging to set up or maintain a cross school Fairtrade group given the current circumstances. Given that, we will accept a group that is meeting online or that is made up of one class or bubble.

We would encourage schools to hold a virtual Fairtrade assembly for Fairtrade Fortnight and you can find assembly plans that are designed for this here. It may be that you could also hold a virtual event around Fairtrade Fortnight or encourage staff, pupils and parents to join the ‘Climate, Fairtrade and You’ festival. This would be an acceptable way of completing this section for FairActive.

As mentioned for FairAware, we have created lots of Home Learning Challenges which again could be used for the ‘Challenge’ section of FairActive.

FairAchiever

There is more flexibility with the Fairtrade policy that we ask schools to have in place – if you are unable to get a policy signed then do not worry, please try to be as thorough as possible with the details and your aims within it.

An Online Learner Audit is coming soon – this has been slightly delayed by technical issues but we hope to have an online format for pupils to complete the learner audit themselves within the next month. This will be linked directly to the application form and aggregate the results for you so should make the process much more efficient.

We are well aware that with schools subject to closure and pupils operating in bubbles the use of Fairtrade products may be much harder at this time. We have introduced the option to ‘skip’ this section of the award, please see below for how the form will look in relation to this;

For the ‘Challenges’ section, it may that you could complete a virtual activity for Fairtrade Fortnight, this could be through a class getting involved with the Youth Exhibition in which we are asking young people to share their vision of the world they want.

There are more details of all of this on the award pages and please do get in touch if you have any questions, email schools@fairtrade.org.uk.

Thank you for supporting Fairtrade.

Joe, Claire and Jo

The Fairtrade Schools Team

Join us on Twitter at  @FairtradeUKEd