Lady Elizabeth & Laude School kick-start Coronavirus Community Support

The Lady Elizabeth School in Benitachell and other Laude Schools across Spain kick-start school and community Coronavirus support initiatives

Sensitive to the challenges the Coronavirus pandemic is generating, Laude Schools (Colegios Laude), a group of 10 schools in Spain and part of the International Schools Partnership, has launched a series of initiatives to help not only families of their own alumni, but also the local communities in which the schools operate.

Their ‘Covid-19 Fee Support Scheme’ brings financial relief in the form of school fees reductions of up to fifty percent until facilities are allowed to reopen, a deferral of re-enrollment dues and the freeze of fees throughout the first term of the next academic year. This scheme comes now in addition to previous actions swiftly implemented after schools were ordered to close their facilities nationwide. Parents were then informed that school bus and lunch fees for the remainder of the month of March would be credited back to them. All in all, these measures are a bold move to help all families through these uncertain moments.

Quoting Chris Akin, Head of The Lady Elizabeth School: ‘for the past two weeks our priority has been our students and we have focused on ensuring the continuity of their education through our Distance Learning programmes, which have received overwhelmingly positive praise from families. Now that Distance Learning is solidly in place, we are kick-starting our Covid-19 Fee Support Scheme to alleviate the immediate financial pressure on our students’ families and to align our fees with the distance learning service their children are now receiving’.

Part of this great financial effort being made by the Laude group of schools is financed through cost-reduction savings and Government-backed programmes. However, ‘our Covid-19 Fee Support Scheme goes beyond and above what is possible at each individual school level. We are only able to support our scheme with the financial backing we receive being part of a great group of successful schools worldwide: the International Schools Partnership (ISP)’, states Cristina Callejon, the group’s Head of Marketing and Communications.

‘Hi Chris! Just wanted to say: THANK YOU VERY MUCH for yesterday’s email! Offered solution is such release for many families. Best wishes to you, your family and team’. This feedback by a parent from The Lady Elizabeth School in Benitachell is one of many positive comments received from across all ten Laude schools in mainland Spain.

All the schools in the Laude group share the common trait of having a strong social commitment and regularly take part in awareness and altruistic initiatives across different social scopes. In response to the Coronavirus crisis, both schools and their family communities have gone out of their way to help. Here are some examples:

The Lady Elizabeth School has donate all its stocks of protective face masks, gloves and protective to Marina Salud Hospital in Denia. Other Laude schools have done the same and some have donated food trays to nursing homes.
Schools which have 3D printers within their ‘Fab Lab’ have joined a national initiative to make face protection masks for health workers. ‘They told us that what they needed most were face protection masks, so we put the printers to work 24 hours a day, making these masks from my home’, explains José Luis García, Head of the ‘Fab Lab’ and Deputy Director of Laude El Altillo School in Jerez.
The group has offered local hospitals use of all their student residence facilities as accommodation for temporary support health workers being brought over from other locations. The Lady Elizabeth School has offered use of their Pedreguer-located student residence to Marina Salud Hospital in Denia.
Another example of social action is the initiative in which some of the Heads of Colegios Laude have participated, which is to offer coaching in implementing virtual learning to other fellow public schools. “We had been preparing for distance learning long before the closure of schools was decreed, in order to seamlessly continue the educational process of our students. We feel proud to pass this know-how onto other schools that need it, ” says Chris Akin, Head of The Lady Elizabeth School in Benitachell.
Colegios Laude encompasses 10 schools in Spain with over 8,000 enrolled students. It is part of the International Schools Partnership (ISP), a growing global educational group of 45 schools around the world, which share the common goal of being the school of choice in their local areas. All ISP schools are deeply rooted in their communities and four of them have been short-listed in the Best Schools in Spain and Best International Schools in Spain 2020 annual school ranking by El Mundo newspaper.

More information:

Julián Gala
Head of Marketing and Communications
The Lady Elizabeth School
Email: j.gala@ladyelizabethschool.com
Teléfono: 699 39 00 87
www.laudeladyelizabeth.com