Children’s charity, Sal’s Shoes is calling on schools to get involved in its successful ‘Toe to Toe’ campaign so more children living overseas can go to school.

Many UK school children start the next term wearing new shoes on their feet, having simply outgrown the pair that they wore last term.  This is in stark contrast with the estimated 300 million children worldwide for whom walking with shoes is a rarity and, in many cases, if a child cannot afford a pair of shoes, they cannot go to school.

Sal’s Shoes coordinates the wide scale donation of pre-loved school shoes from schools around the UK to those who otherwise cannot get an education.

Every pair of shoes can be tracked and the school receives details of the new feet their shoes have found. For example, five young boys, aged between 9 and 12 years’ old in Nicaragua, had spent their lives picking coffee in the fields for $1.31 a day.   Now they have shoes so they are allowed to go to school and create a brighter future for themselves.

Founder of Sal’s Shoes, CJ Bowry says

The Toe to Toe campaign has been hugely popular since we launched at the end of the 2016 academic year, when the children from just one primary school placed their shoes on their desks on the last day of term and left the school barefoot, to start the summer holiday. The following year, over 600 schools took part and we received over 175,000 pairs of donated school shoes as a result!

To find out how your school can get involved with the Toe to Toe campaign, please visit the website www.salsshoes.com or Facebook Page www.facebook.com/salsshoes1

The deadline to confirm your school’s participation in Toe to Toe 2019 is Friday 31 May 2019 [Northern Ireland Friday 26 April 2019].

Photo: Sal’s shoes