HARVEST Festival is a great primary school tradition and children are usually keen to take part.

But while most of them are happy to take along a cardboard box full of packets and tins, eight-year-old Thomas Hall was thinking big.

This Year 4 pupil at Horndean CE Junior School in Five Heads Road, Horndean, wrote a letter asking for donations which he posted through neighbours’ letterboxes.

The school was collecting food for the Horndean Foodbank, so Thomas detailed its work to provide short-term emergency food supplies for local families in crisis.

He said: “I am a member of my school’s Children’s Christian Values Team and I want to make a big difference this harvest time.”

Thomas’s mother Hayley Hall said: “The response has been phenomenal and we took 16 shopping bags of food to school. When the staff laid out all the food he collected, it filled the tables they had put out.

“All the other children had to put their food on the floor!”

During the school’s harvest assembly headteacher Maria Ackland commended Thomas for his “actions and kindness”.

They earned him a place on the school’s TLC Hero chair, which is reserved for the pupil who does the most to live up to its motto of TLC – ‘Thinking with thanksgiving, Learning with love and Caring with compassion’.

Horndean Foodbank’s food parcels provide enough nutritious basic ingredients to create several meals.

The foodbank is stocked by the generosity of people from Horndean and the surrounding areas, and is run in partnership with Horndean Churches Together.

To request a food parcel or donate food, call 07914 504715.