A GROUP of students from Yate are set for a life-changing trip to Uganda after raising thousands of pounds to pay for themselves and give impoverished African children a safari trip they will never forget.

The 12 students and two teachers from Brimsham Green School leave for Kampala on July 17 where they will spend two weeks teaching at Yate’s linked school Hosanna Primary, visiting children in their homes and running a trip for 60 pupils to Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Organiser and Brimsham’s head of Years 7 and 8 Jo Hewitt said: “Our students will be shattered by the end of it, every day is full on teaching four lessons a day on a range of different subjects from First Aid and sex education to modes of transport and phonics.”

She added: “An experience like this when I was a teenager was life-changing and having taken groups of students before you can see the benefit to them.

“We aim to expose them to absolutely everything so they visit children in their homes and we visit a project where women make beads from paper to sell but we also take them to the hotel where the Queen once stayed. I think it is important that they don’t just think of Africa and assume everyone is poor.

“It generates lots of discussion and debate about poverty and injustice and the visits to children’s homes are always what our students find the most difficult.”

The Year 12 and 13 students had to apply for a place on the trip, which runs every two years, go through an interview selection process and then fundraise £27,000 as a group.

They have organised and run various events to raise the money including a barn dance, quizzes, film nights, race nights and holding a tuck shop at every school event and a stall at community events including Victorian Evening in Chipping Sodbury and Kingsgate Park music festival in Yate.

After toppling the £20,000 the students wrote to Chipping Sodbury Rotary Club and after several members met the group and discussed the trip, they were awarded £3,000.

Rotarian John Berridge said: “These students will come away with a much better and broader understanding of a whole range of things, of themselves and others.

“The more we get closer to people and communicate with them the better we understand them and the more likely we are to try and overcome bigger problems.”

One former Brimsham student who went to Kampala now takes groups of young people to developing world countries to work in conversation, Miss Hewitt said.

The partnership with Hosanna school was first formed by Brimsham teacher Maggie McLean, a member of Chipping Sodbury Baptist Church, and will celebrate its 15th anniversary in 2018.