School councils

There are two school councils:  School Council and Eco School Council

1. School council

Who are we?

This year we have 16 representatives on our School Council – This is made up of one boy & one girl from each class.

How are representatives selected?

Children who wanted to be on the council were nominated in each class. Last year’s council then organised a secret ballot - the boy & girl with the most votes won.

What do we do?

• We elected a Chair, Vice-chair, Secretary & Treasurer at our first meeting. We meet at least once a month.
• At our meetings we organise fundraising activities & discuss ideas to improve our school.
• We report back to our classes after every meeting to give everyone a chance to be involved.

The children in our classes can make suggestions by writing them in special books, which we have in each class.

When we have ideas, we put them to the vote & then we tell Mrs Cummings. Mrs Cummings (& sometimes the Governors) then decides whether these ideas can be carried out.

What have we done so far?

Last year we decided that new play equipment was needed.

We felt that the children who didn’t play football didn’t have much to do & also that the grassy area was useless in the winter because we weren’t allowed on it because of the mud.

We came up with lots of ideas for fundraising & in the end we raised £3,000 in just two terms. We used the money raised to buy the new equipment we had chosen.

Also, at a meeting last year a suggestion was made that the boys’ toilets upstairs in Year 6 should be repaired & re-opened. Mr Winterbourn, our caretaker, worked very hard to fix them & the toilets are now in use.

Another HUGE change happened when we started looking at energy saving…The school asked an architect to use a special device to see how much heat we were losing through the windows. The results showed a terrible waste, so Mrs Cummings managed to get some money to change every external window & door in the building.

We think that the school looks much smarter & will definitely be more energy efficient from now on.

What next?

As well as our Eco-Schools Green Flag work, we are also working towards the Healthy Schools Silver Award this year as part of the School Improvement Plan.

We have already attained many of the targets and hope to get as many parents as possible involved in this project.

2. Eco-council

Our Eco-council is made up of the four Year 5 Council Representatives.

They are responsible for:

• co-ordinating and weighing the recycling,
• checking litter & bins in the school grounds and
• making sure that the Energy monitors* do their job.

(*Energy Monitors are appointed in each class to make sure that lights & computers are switched off when not in use).

The Eco-council members will also monitor meter readings with Mr Winterbourn to find out where we can save more energy and water.

They feed back to the council who then report back to their classes.

Eco-Code 2006

Because we care about our school and the environment…

Devised by Liam Hodgson & Emily Foster ‘06

Green Flag Award

• We have been working very hard to make our school as eco-friendly as possible.
• We are improving our environment through litter-picking, building new equipment, creating a wildlife area & vegetable garden and also an outdoor classroom.
• We have looked at water & energy wastage, both in school & globally, through assemblies, displays & visits from environmental experts.
• We put our litter in the bin, we try to reduce, re-use & recycle whatever we can, we try to walk to school as often as we can & we try to reduce the amount of energy & water we use in school.
• We hope that our efforts will be recognised when the ECO-schools assessors visit our school on Friday 12^th January – we’ll let you know!