Who We Are - Our story
Salusbury WORLD:
a triumph in the face of diversity
Ahlam is an Iraqi Kurd brought up in Kuwait. She moved to London from Holland, where the family had become citizens, to be closer to her sick mother. Her children were upset – they had just started to feel at home in Holland, and were getting to grips with the Dutch language. Now they were back to square one: another new school, another new language and another new home. Two weeks after moving into a new flat they were burgled.
"It was awful," she says, "But Salusbury WORLD helped me with the letters and made telephone calls. Without it, I would not have known what to do. It helps my children with their English, gives them a place to do their homework and talk with other children from their background. When a letter comes, I bring it to Salusbury WORLD so someone can explain it. Now, I am trying to get a place to learn English and they"re helping with that."
Salusbury School has served, and in all likelihood will always serve, an area with a wide and changing ethnic mix. In the 1930s, it offered German as a second language in response to a wave of Jewish immigration; today, over forty different first languages are spoken within the school. It is, as the saying goes, rich in cultural diversity, but in Salusbury School"s case the tired old phrase is invested with real meaning. Salusbury WORLD has a central role in this.
Salusbury WORLD is unique. From the outset it was conceived as a centre operating inside the school that would offer support both to refugee children and their parents. Spend any time there, and it quickly becomes apparent why.
"It arose out of a necessity," Head Teacher Carol Munro says. "We take a lot of refugees in this school, and as they arrived, we were trying to help families with little English and enormous needs on a case by case basis. The idea behind Salusbury WORLD was to create a resource dedicated to helping families not only acclimatise, but deal with very real and pressing problems that come up on a regular basis. It"s one thing to have an inclusion policy - quite another to make it work."
Such a broad remit - homework to housing – is ambitious but Salusbury WORLD succeeds because it is clear about it what wants to do, is realistic about what it can do, and decisions are guided by a set of stable principles.