"Free food and a day off school timetable - what's not to love?"

It was 8:15am. I stood, chopping melons, in a 60 year old Chinese dress. Outside, some unusually dour northern weather was doing its utmost best to turn Benton Park School into a lake. The Year 7s were practically having to swim past the school gates and the Brazilian samba band looked incredibly nostalgic for the golden sun of Rio.

Okay, so the last paragraph sounds like the start of a low budget disaster movie, but it was in fact the start of Benton Park's famous World Religions Day!

I love World Religions Day. It's the crazy brain child of Benton's Religious Studies and Philosophy department, and Head Teacher Mr Foley. Conceived four years ago in an attempt to bring cultural diversity to Benton Park, it has been a roaring success right from the start.

The day's main outcome is to teach Year 7s about different cultures and religions whilst they have fun. It consists of various different activities, including a food tasting workshop, a Bollywood dance class, a 'finding God' workshop, traditional henna tattooing, a samba workshop, a concert featuring a hip hop dance troupe and the school jazz band, and even a 'come dine with me' competition in the staff room.

A particular highlight this year was the samba workshop. Within five minutes, the Brazilian Boys had a room full of lethargic 12-year-olds up drumming and dancing! The atmosphere was magical, (even I with my infamous left feet) had a little dance. Another memorable point was the food tasting. As 12-year-old Harry Pilling said:

Free food and a day off school timetable - what's not to love?

Tables beckoned, inviting you to step right into an entirely different continent. A wet Friday morning in July was transformed into an Indian spice market. Every food imaginable from every country nameable was there. Everything from bowlfuls of tangy hummus, to modest looking samosas that almost blew your head off. There were even some bizarre Indian sweets that looked like bits of gravel, but tasted of mint humbugs.

We also learnt interesting facts about the country of origin of the food we were tasting. I heard some amazing stories of Hindu gods, and funny tales of uncles on gap years in Thailand. And after we'd eaten all that food, what a better way to burn it all off than with an hour of Bollywood dancing?
Critics of Christianity, might whinge about the 'finding God' workshop (run by Leeds Faith in Schools), but even I, (a stubborn atheist) found aspects of the workshop rewarding. Whether you believe in God or not, Christianity is here to stay in Britain, so learning about its values is incredibly important, so people can understand each other.

I think the rest of the U.K. would certainly benefit from schemes like World Religions Day. As a 14-year-old, headlines about local stabbings and racial tension are extremely frightening, and even such small gestures like World Religions Day can go a long way to understanding and harmony, because that's all racism is: a huge lack of understanding.

I also wish that anyone who thinks that young people are lazy slackers could have seen World Religions Day. It sounds cheesy, but I felt incredibly proud of the way everyone had joined forces to organise the event and I felt incredibly privileged to have been a part of it all.
And as the last note of the school Jazz band died away, I could not help but smile, and rejoice in the fact that I'd managed not to ruin the 60 year old silk Chinese dress.

Fran Talbot, 14, was a runner-up in Amnesty International's 2012 Young Human Rights Reporter of the Year competition. Her lively blog is here. Her teacher Sajeela Shah blogs more about that here. Ella Weeks is a fellow-pupil at Benton Park in Rawdon, Leeds.