A GROUP of Kendal school pupils have delivered gift bags to hospital staff.

The pupils from The Queen Katherine School (QKS) organised fifty gift bags in partnership with Cumbria Youth Alliance to be delivered to the Oncology department of Westmorland General Hospital.

The Cumbria Youth Alliance run the 'dream scheme' project, which gives small grants to groups to carry out volunteering activities which will benefit the community and the volunteers will earn points for their social action volunteering.

This was one of ten in the county to carry out 'dream scheme' type projects.

There were 14 pupils from the school took who participated in this programme, where they learned how to do business planning and budgeting for their project. They then will be eligible for accredited awards for their volunteering or enterprise.

Through this the alliance funded two project's at QKS, On why the pupils got involved, Youth Wellbeing and Resilience worker, Mr Iain Biddle said: "The students were taking part in a social action programme in school, they were doing that for eight weeks.

"Part of that was for them to choose a cause that they wanted to give back to."

Then the pupils made contact with the oncology department at the Westmorland General, the students made orders and then put together the gift bags, inside were necessities like hand products and items that would help with their skin.

Mr Biddle said that the gift bags were well received from the staff in the hospital, he said: "We got an email from one of the nurses to say thank you, unfortunately, the nurses couldn't come out to see us so their representative came and received the gifts.

"In an ideal world we would've gone down to the hospital to give them the gifts but we couldn't because of Covid."

On the impact this had on the pupils Mr Biddle said: "The pupils were delighted and very proud of their achievements, they worked incredibly hard and considering the constraints around Covid, they were able to put together something which was a direct benefit to our community."