On Monday 16th May 2011 we were invited to an exciting national award ceremony in London to receive our Diana Awards. Mrs Smith kindly nominated us because we raised £628 for Breast Cancer and Motor Neurone Disease charities and we continue to raise money. These are charities that are close to our hearts and have affected our families in some way, as well as many families around the world. We wanted to raise awareness of these charities and help to raise money for research into these illnesses.

 

We spent the morning getting ready and at 11.45 am we left to go to White Notley Station to catch the train to London with our families; we were all very excited! Once we arrived at Canary Wharf we went for lunch in a posh restaurant and then walked down to the presentation room to wait for the event to begin.

Everybody was shown to their seats and the event began with a speech of what the Award actually was and why it was introduced. Students from other schools began to be called up to the stage to collect their awards. We all listened carefully to what everybody had achieved; some older students had raised money to help build schools and toilet blocks in Ghana, others had started anti-bullying campaigns in their schools to raise awareness. Finally we were called up to receive our award. It was presented by the celebrity actress and singer Sinitta, (as seen on the X-Factor!) which was fantastic. She congratulated us and we all had a photograph together.

After all the awards had been given out there was a buffet in the main hall, giving us an opportunity to talk to other students from other schools. After a long day and as much food as we could eat we began to make our way home.

It was a brilliant day and it gave us ideas of what charity events to get involved with in the future. It was lovely for our hard work to be recognised by others.