Charity in the Community

The Lucy Rayner Foundation

Hazelwood School proudly partners with The Lucy Rayner Foundation, which provides valuable support for young peoples’ mental health and wellbeing.

The Lucy Rayner Foundation aims to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of mental ill health in young people and provides counselling in a timely manner, allowing them to receive vital support when they most need it. It also provides training to schools to help teachers identify signs of mental health issues, enabling them to provide support with anxiety, low self-esteem, peer pressure and anger management.

On May 13th this year, our school community dressed in their own clothes for ‘Mufti for Mindfulness’ to raise money for the charity. To find out more about how this amazing charity supports young people, or to make a donation, please follow the link below.

Donate to Support Young People's Mental Health

Supporting Local Initiatives

In addition to our partnership with The Lucy Rayner Foundation, we are also committed to giving back to other community initiatives and charities.

Community Fund Grant

In early 2023, we awarded a Community Fund Grant to Edenbridge Primary School. The money directly helped pupils to buy new school rucksacks, new uniform and help fund places on a residential trip, which the pupils would not otherwise have been able to afford to participate in.

The Giving Project

At the end of 2023, Year 5 launched a new initiative called The Giving Project. So far, pupils have made and sold Christmas gifts and donated the money to the local food bank and also baked over 400 cookies and distributed them to three local care homes in the Oxted and Godstone area. More recently, pupils made Easter crafts to give away as random acts of kindness around Oxted and at East Surrey Hospital.

As I walked into hospital to start work, I had a wonderful greeting. A polite young man handed me a beautiful cross stitch card of a rainbow and a chocolate egg. I was very happy to receive these kind gifts and it gave me an extra bounce in my step.

Miss L
Medical Secretary

Tanzania

In 2018, Hazelwood was delighted to build links with the four community schools in the Songwe District of Tanzania. During the holidays, staff visited the schools to work with the teachers in Africa to devise teaching and learning strategies aimed at increasing the levels of attendance and attainment. School fundraising provides much needed resources for the community schools. The impact of the partnership to date has been encouraging, with pupils coming to school more often and making significant progress in their studies.

Give a Child a Wig & Help for Heroes

In 2016, we hosted our first Give a Child a Wig for Christmas, with £10,000 being raised in sponsorship and metres of cut hair being donated to the charity that works with young cancer sufferers.

Later that year, we also staged the school's fourth HeroBear Triathlon in aid of Help for Heroes. Staff, pupils and parents completed the gruelling course alongside each other. The total raised for the charity over the four events was almost £100,000.

Local Charities

We support many local charities:

	Renewed Hope A local charity providing practical solutions and emotional support to the homeless, vulnerable and isolated of East Surrey. Each year, Hazelwood regularly collects winter care packages to support the charity.
	Children’s Book Project We support this initiative each year, by asking parents to donate new and nearly new books. The Children’s Book Project has gifted over 1 million books since 2014 to children who have no, or very few, books of their own.
	Harvest Festival Hazelwood regularly collects items from our parent body, which are then distributed to local foodbanks.