Today Joel and Erin of S6 travelled through to the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh, accompanied by Mr Herd, Mr Maybury and Mr Sinclair, to receive the Vision School Scotland Level 1 Award on behalf of Barrhead High School.

The award aims to recognise and support innovation and good practice in Holocaust education and identifies and rewards schools who demonstrate this.

The school submitted an application detailing our involvement earlier this year and in June, an assessor visited the school and confirmed we had met the criteria required.

The award was presented to us at a special ceremony today by Barbara Winton. Barbara is the daughter of the late Nicholas Winton who supervised the rescue of 669 children, mostly Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. Barbara then spoke of her father’s work and why an understanding of the Holocaust is still vital today.

Pupils and staff from 7 other schools also received the Level 1 Award and a further 2 now attained Level 2 – a future goal for us. We join Calderwood Lodge Primary School as Vision Schools in East Renfrewshire.

We were joined at the ceremony by former pupil and ambassador for the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), Kirsty Robson. Kirsty’s own involvement was inspired by her visit to Auschwitz with HET Lessons from Auschwitz programme. wen she was a pupil at Barrhead High.