500 signatures reached
To: Priti Patel, Home Secretary
Allow child refugees to take up the offer of free places at UK boarding schools
Please take up the Boarding Schools’ Association’s offer of free school places for unaccompanied child refugees. This offer, by over 80 boarding schools, was made in 2015, but so far the government has sent only two children to take them up. The offer was renewed at the end of January by Robin Fletcher, chief executive of BSA.
Why is this important?
My father and his brother were able to come here as child refugees in 1939 because of the generosity of Rydal School in North Wales, which hosted them. My uncle said later, ‘We came as strangers; you took us in.’ Today, boarding schools are making a similar generous offer to help some of the unaccompanied child refugees currently suffering appalling conditions in Lesbos, Calais and other refugee camps. Despite this offer being at no cost to the taxpayer, the government has failed to take it up.
