Penwortham Girls' High School is the first secondary school to be awarded the full Lancashire Equality Mark

The award is given to schools that can demonstrate a commitment to embedding equality throughout their practice and who enable all their students to thrive in a supportive learning community.

The school says that for the past three years, they have been working towards the Lancashire Equality Mark, which has six different strands which must all be achieved individually before the school can be granted it in full.

These are socio-economic, race, religion, gender and gender variance, sexual orientation and disability, and during this last term, Penwortham Girls has been working towards the final strand, disability, successfully being awarded it last month.

The school says that working towards these different strands has created lots of opportunities to celebrate their diverse community.

This included celebrating International Women’s Day by welcoming some of their “incredible” PGHS alumni back into the school, such as Dame Sue Ion and the BBC’s Nazia Mogra.

The school community has also broadened their knowledge of equality in the wider world through a research competition for Black History Month, sessions with ‘Solutions Not Sides’ during school drop down days, and last year, they held their very own ‘Unitee’ fashion show, which challenged each form to create their own T-Shirt inspired by the theme of unity.

At the end of April, a representative from Lancashire County Council also came in to visit Penwortham Girl’s to see what we have been doing as a school in order to ensure and promote equality.