FGS Proudly Assisting During Lockdown

Posted at 2:03 pm on 14th April, 2020

At Flixton Girls School we really feel at the centre of our local community and during these unprecedented times our departments have been pulling together to assist others within this community.

Headteacher Mrs Hazeldine said,
‘My Director of Health and Well-Being, who is also head of the CREATE Faculty (Art & DT), Jess Foxley, had seen that some schools were beginning to help the national effort with production of PPE. There is a standard set of instructions for how to create the visors so her team have been totally on board to set this up.

Jess said ‘When we saw other Design and Technology departments making this kind of PPE we jumped at the chance of helping out. We all want to do what we can to support our frontline workers and we aim to keep production running for as long as we can source the materials, so if anyone does have any polypropylene (0.75/0.8 thickness) please send our way.’

We have since set up a wishlist on Amazon and are investigating the best way for parents and the community to make donations, as people are so keen to help in any way they can.

Our technician in the CREATE Faculty, Bernie has picked up on a fashion project from Central St Martins (University of the ARTS Central London) to create safety compliant PPE for hospital and other frontline staff. We have the machines and the expertise to do this and this will also begin this week.

We first started to look at this 3 weeks ago when our Head of Science, Mike Darby was contacted by 2 of his Doctor friends asking for science masks. We provided quite a number for their hospitals and the week before last we took boxes of these safety compliant goggle masks to 3 of our local GP practices and pharmacy.

We have been contacted by several members of our community in fact a sister at Salford Royal Infirmary said they were broken into over the weekend and their PPE kit was stolen. Today we supplied some science safety masks to a charity called Kershaw’s Hospice who look after elderly people both in their own homes and the hospice.

We are being contacted by ex-pupils and relatives of workers in a variety of care settings so we are now setting up a more formalised structure to be able to help.

We want to prioritise our immediate community and especially areas such as care homes within the Urmston, Davyhulme Flixton and Stretford area. We cannot produce great quantities but we can help those smaller organisations to keep both their workers and their clients safe.’