While the adults were voting, the Year 8 pupils at Ashton Park School were getting their hands dirty as part of a Community Action Day. They were too young to vote on Thursday, but hundreds of students at a South Bristol school spent the morning of the General Election doing a different kind of civic duty.

More than 200 pupils in Year 8 at Ashton Park School in Bower Ashton were given time off their regular lessons on General Election day, if they volunteered to spruce up the area around the school. For scores of them, that involved getting out of their school uniforms and whitewashing the walls of the maze of underpasses, tunnels and pedestrian walkways that criss-cross the Winterstoke Road junction, which separates the school from the rest of Bristol. For many others, it involved getting their hands dirty on a mass litter-pick that took in all the pavements, roads, verges and hedges from the school gates to the Ashton Court Estate, down into Ashton Gate and all the way to North Street. “The 200 students all volunteered to repaint the two underpasses near our school, which are in desperate need of a facelift,” said Jo Deane, Strategic Executive Assistant at Ashton Park School.

“The underpasses aren’t just used by students, they are a vital part of the way our community travel across Bristol, and it’s environmentally friendly,” she added.