Our students can produce some of the most well thought out and creative pieces of work just by using, and experimenting with the English language.  

Take a look at this brilliant piece of writing produced by Carla from Chile; it is based on an inspirational person she learnt about from a class excursion to the National Portrait Gallery in London.

When I saw Emmeline Pakhurst’s portrait for the first time I thought “she seems a strong woman” but I did not pay too much attention and rapidly went on to look for a portrait of an inspiring person to write about. However, I could not find anybody who really caught my attention.

After a while, I decided to either write about William Shakespeare or the scientist Robert Boyle, because they undoubtedly made a great contribution to literature and science respectively. However, I saw the portrait of Emmeline Pankhurst again while I was looking for my friends, but this time I read her biography and without thinking much more, I changed my mind.

She was the appropriate person to write about, not only because she was the leader of the campaign for womens rights to vote, but also because during my whole life people like her have inspired me. Unfortunately, for a long time women did not have the same rights as a man. Despite that fact, brave women like Emmeline were willing to change history and struggle for what they believed was fair.

Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858 in England and belongs to a family with a tradition of radical politics. In 1889, she founded the Women’s Franchise League, which fought to allow married women to vote in local elections. After that, she helped found Women’s Social and Political Union, with her eldest daughter, an organisation that had lots of notoriety for its activities and whose members were the first to be ‘suffragettes’. In 1918 they achieved a partial success when women over the aged of thirty were allowed to vote. Emmeline died in June 1928 shortly after women were granted equal voting rights with men.

In my opinion, nowadays there are a lot of important things for struggling but at the same time one of the worst problems is that we have forgotten to respect each other. Currently, we are living in a hurry and something is wrong with that; we are not thinking about the feelings of other people or even more, we sometimes do not care about the environment. We have to stop being selfish and ambitious and try to build a world where respect is most important; where people are able to listen and seek solutions together. I believe we need brave people willing to say why they are making such an effort for things that they believe are correct.

Grand work Carla, well done! 

(Carla is in the middle)