Will you help us protect little lungs?

Two of our amazing British Lung Foundation junior campaigners, eight-year-old Jannat and Jess, tell us how they’ve been busy campaigning for clean air outside their school in Manchester and how you can help.

Toxic air is damaging our lungs

We love where we live on the border of Levenshulme and Longsight but there are so many cars and the air stinks with the fumes. Some of the grown-ups started a group called Clean Air Levenshulme. They started measuring the air and found out pollution was really high.

We learned that air pollution damages children’s lungs and makes asthma worse. We were really worried about one of our friends who has bad asthma. We heard about a really sad story in London where a young girl died because air pollution made her asthma so bad.

We were so shocked to find out that our lungs won’t catch up with those kids that grow up in cleaner air and that when we grow up we are more likely to be sick with things like lung cancer.

The British Lung Foundation told us that there are 8,000 schools in England where pollution is really high outside which could be making millions of children ill. This is so unfair and that’s why we are taking action.

Measuring the problem

We wanted to find out more so the British Lung Foundation helped us measure air pollution where we live and our mums helped us put up a monitor on our local high street. It is a sensor that measures air pollution: nitrogen dioxide which is a poisonous gas and tiny particles that are 30 times smaller than a human hair called PM2.5.

We put it on the local high street as it’s near where we live and we breathe the air there all the time. It is a main road from Stockport to the city centre. We needed the monitor to be somewhere safe and near the road and luckily the manager at the Jain Community Centre let us put it on their fence.

Talking to our MP

Our MP, Afzal Kahn, was visiting on the same day and he was really interested to find out what we were doing. We told him all about the problem and said we’d let him know the results. We left the monitor there for about a month and found that levels of both types of air pollution were very high and unsafe. Next, we put the sensor in the grounds of a nursery on the main road and the levels were really high there too. We felt so sad about all those tiny lungs being hurt by the air around them.

Toxic air outside our school

Our school, Crowcroft Primary, is just off the main road so we thought the problem wouldn’t be as bad. But we were wrong - levels of pollution were regularly high and sometimes there were spikes that were even higher than levels on the main road. We think it’s because the road is often used as a shortcut by cars and there are so many people that still drive to our school or idle their engines outside.

Now we’re campaigning for a school street for every child in Manchester

We heard that some other schools have streets outside that are closed in the morning and afternoon to make it safer for us kids. We think this is a brilliant idea for stopping toxic pollution and will help more of our friends to walk, cycle or scoot to school. We can’t wait until we don’t have to walk past smelly fumes at the school gate every day. We want Manchester City Council to put a school street outside every school and protect children’s lungs so we can all grow up healthy.

Sign our petition to protect little lungs

You can help us make sure thousands of children in Manchester are protected from dirty air pollution outside their schools. We aren’t old enough to have a petition in our own name and so our mums helped us to work out what to say, please sign it!

Want to campaign for clean air where you live like Jannat and Jess? Sign up to be a British Lung Foundation clean air campaigner today.

And find out more here about Greater Manchester’s toxic air and how you can help.

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