Our School Council
Our School Council meets once a week. Two children from every class represent their own class on the School Council. The children are elected to the School Council by their peers. They take whole school issues and ideas from their own class councils and feed them into the School Council. They also share ideas and decisions from School Council with their class. Decisions made within School Council can, and do, have a real impact on the rest of the school.
Roles and responsibilities
Everyone has a job on School Council because we think it’s important that the children run it and are fully involved in it. Here are some of those roles and responsibilities:
| Chair | Chairs the meeting. |
| Vice Chair | Alternates chairing the meeting with the chair. |
| Secretary 1 | Writes Minutes in the meeting and types them up afterwards. |
| Admin Distributor | Hands out information such as weekly agendas and minutes to all School Council children. |
| Administration | General administration role. |
| Venue Manager x4 | Set up the meeting room prior to each meeting. |
| Alerting Team x2 | Ring the bell prior to SC meetings, calling SC children in from playground. |
| Registration Officer | Takes the register at each meeting, informs Secretary of absentees. |
| Publicity Officer | Makes sure minutes/agendas etc are photocopied and passed on to Admin Distributors. |
| Parent Liaison Reps | Responsible for communication with parents. |
| Poster Committee X2 | Prepares posters on the computer and displays them around the school. |
| Care Taker Rep | Takes School Council requests to the caretaker. |
| Governor Liaison Rep | Ensures School Governors are kept informed. |
On-going Projects - 2010/11
Staying Healthy - our School Council plays a very active role in encouraging children in school to lead a healthy lifestyle. This year we have held three 'Scoot to School' weeks, where children are encouraged to walk, cycle or scoot to school rather than come by car. We have also re-launched 'Fruity Friday'. Children are asked to bring a piece of fruit to school for snack time on a Friday, rather than something less healthy. We have also been promoting the idea of healthy snacks in school and we have seen a big reduction in the number of children bringing crisps and biscuits in for snacks.
Staying Safe - We launched this initiative with a poster competition. Children could design a poster about any aspect of keeping safe. The winners were chosen by two of our school Governors and they each won a WH Smiths voucher. We have also set up a Safety Team with one representative from each class. The team have thought of some sensible rules to help to keep children safe whilst in school. These have been incorporated into signs and posters around the school. The Safety Team also do safety checks around school.
Promotional DVD - The School Council were very involved in the creation of a promotional DVD for the school. Many of their ideas were included in the final DVD which can be seen on the home page of the website.
Green Team - All of the members of the School Council take a turn at being on the 'Green Team'. This involves them checking classrooms at break time and lunchtime to ensure that lights and monitors have been turned off and that heating thermostats are set at a reasonable temperature. The School Council have also raised enough money to purchase paper recycling bins for every classroom and these are emptied regularly by our caretaker.
In 2009 we entered a competition run by Total and were awarded nine Green School Awards for a number of projects that have been run in school. These include:-
- Paper recycling bins in classrooms
- Scoot to School weeks
- The Green Team initiative
- Litter Nipper Pickers
- School Gardens
- Year 3 'Beautiful Bishop's Cleeve' project
- Year 4 Global Warming Reduction Research
- Year 4 Environmental Time Travellers Project
We continue to think about how we can improve the green credentials of our school.
Quiet Area Redevelopment - The School Council listened to feedback from the class councils and decided to prioritise the re-development of the two quiet areas in the infant and junior playgrounds. This will included tidying up the areas, weeding and general gardening, painting benches and providing tables for activities such as reading and drawing. To help fund this they ran a stall at the school fete. A cake sale is also planned.
Friendship benches - Several years ago the School Council decided to provide 'Friendship Benches' in both playgrounds. The idea of a Friendship Bench is that someone who is lonely comes and sits on the Friendship Bench and other children will see them and invite them to join in with their games. The School Council identified two rather tired and battered old benches and then gave them a facelift. The children sanded them down and then painted them in bright colours. The photographs in the gallery below show the results of the hard work done by the School Council. These benches have been a great success but they are looking a little tired now. The School Council have decided to re-paint these benches soon.
Gallery: Friendship Bench
Litter Nipper Pickers - One of our more popular initiatives is the creation of the role of 'Litter Nipper Pickers'. Council members take it in turn to patrol the playground collecting and removing litter using litter pickers. The children identified the problem of litter as something they wished to tackle and then raised enough money to purchase bibs, baseball caps and litter pickers for the team. The school also helped by buying some extra litter bins for the playground. As a result our playgrounds have been much tidier.
Battery Hens - This is a new idea for us at BCPS. The School Council have been in touch with a school near Bath who already re-home battery hens and then sell the eggs to parents from the school. We are investigating the possibility of doing this here too.
