Guilsborough C of E Primary School

Guilsborough C of E Primary School

School Council Members

Members Of The School Council

September 2024

 

The School Council provides pupils with a forum for discussion and participation in school decision making. Members of the School Council are voted onto the Council and each class is represented from Reception to Year 6.

The School Council members meet regularly to discuss key issues and members feed back to their classes any decisions / information from the meetings.  Members are involved in policy reviews - behaviour and anti-bullying - and give a child's perspective on issues like playtimes, after school clubs, fundraising events and the purchase of new equipment.  Discussions are always lively as Council Members raise issues and concerns canvassed from their colleagues in class and the Council's contribution to school life is invaluable.

Council members are also developing their role as mentors for the younger children in school. 

2023 - 2024

The School Council continue to make our school even better! At our first meeting we discussed what we wanted to do to make our school better and the three objectives we decided on were as follows - 

  1. To raise money to help in a whole school activity/trip
  2. To raise money for new playground equipment to use in our rainbow shelter
  3. To come up with ideas of how to fund raise for our PDET Trust chosen charity.

This year we achieve all of our objectives!

In December the School Council held a whole school 'Bake Off' and cake sale. The school council had lots of fun judging the Staff entries... Miss Patrick won! We raised over £500!

In our School Council meetings we agreed to spend the money putting some towards a whole school trip to Cadbury's World in the summer and also to buy some new activities to make our rainbow shelter even better. 

2022-2023

It was a very busy year of fundraising but again our school councilors were working hard to make our school even better. Money we raised this year was spent on our new outdoor stage learning area. It has been great to use in all weathers giving all of our pupils a space to play, relax and be comfortable in all weather! 

2021 - 2022

Our new School Council were very excited to meet in the Autumn term after being chosen through a vote to represent their classes. In our first two meetings this Autumn term it was decided and agreed that our first project would be to raise money for some new playtime equipment. The School Council discussed that they would like each class to have their own playtime equipment/game boxes to make their playtimes even better. The School Council also decided that each class would get the opportunity to create a list of what they would like in their individual playtime class boxes. With support from our wonderful PTA we are hoping to raise money to order the new equipment in the Spring Term..... Watch this space!

This Spring term the School Council completed a whole school assembly to explain about our achievements so far and to show the new playtime equipment tubs for each class. All of the children were very excited about this. We will be giving feedback on how the playtime equipment is being used in the summer term.

2020 - 2021

What a busy start to the year our School Council member have had! We had our first School Council meeting on Tuesday 29th September. We discuss all of the things that we want to do this year to make our school even better. It was decided and agreed that we would like to raise money for a new bike shelter, as many of our pupils want to cycle to school and we currently don't have anywhere we can keep our bikes secure. We also discussed that it would be super if we could update our school toilets. The school council even had the idea for our pupils to have an input on how they would like it to be decorated!

Our first project to raise money!

Watch our video below to find out about our House Mascot Competition!

 

 

We raised over £50 from our mascot competition and had so many wonderful entries. See the winning entries below which were chosen by our School Council members and our House Team leaders!

 

In February 2021 we were delighted to receive some funding from the Wilson Foundation to support our bike shelter project. Over the half term break we had it installed on our front playground, ready to be used by pupils who want to ride their bikes and scooters to school. Thank you to our School Council for proposing the idea at the start of term and for all of the support from our Guilsborough family.

 

Together with the School Council and PTA we have decorated our pupil toilets over the summer break making them look and smell delightful. This idea was originally discussed by our School Council at the start of the academic year and now the children are so excited to see that their ideas and preferences for the toilets have actually happen. We always say that we achieve more together at Guilsborough. Our School Council 2020-2021 achieve so much and I’m sure our School Council 2021-2022 will have lots of ideas to share with how we can make our school even better.

2019-2020

We have had a great start to our school year! Our first important job was to gather ideas for our House Point treat for the end of term. As you know, the winning house team have a reward in school to celebrate their hard work and excellent behaviour. Our class representatives held a meeting with their own classes to get the children’s ideas and then reported these back to our School Council. Mrs Shilliam discussed these ideas with the staff. The chosen treat will be announced at the end of Autumn term when the winning team is declared! We have had some fantastic suggestions and we can’t wait to find out who has won and what the treat will be!

As a School Council, we wrote a letter to thank Mr Smith, a fabulous artist, for the wonderful artwork he created in our KS2 shared area. The children each picked particular parts of the artwork that they liked and we put together a letter to express gratitude on behalf of our whole school.

Our next big job was the renaming of the Sparkle Room. Mrs Shilliam and Mrs Maxwell felt that the Sparkle Room, whilst useful and practical, was not really very sparkly! As a School Council, we decided to ask the children in our classes for ideas for a new name. We gathered these suggestions together and then chose one from each class. Honey and Daniel in Year 6, presented the final 5 names to the whole school in an assembly

Let the voting begin! Our votes coincided with the general election and gave the children the opportunity to take part in a democratic process about something that is real to them. The School Council members organised the ballot papers and we had an official ballot box. Every child had a vote and our School Councillors then counted the votes......... The winning name was......... The Learning Lab!  

We continue to have School Council meetings with a warming hot chocolate treat, as voted for by the children! The children are working hard and enjoying their role as class representatives. They are doing a fantastic job and we are very proud of them!

 

Please see our January Assembly presentation below.

2018-2019

Our School Council 2018-19 have been very busy, continuing the super work that the previous School Council started. Our representative Councillors were Harriet (Year 6 Chair) and Beatrice (Year 5 Vice Chair). Half way through their term of office they swapped roles and Edun (Year 6) became Chair and Rhys (Year 5) Vice Chair.

 The School Council decided to have their own stall at our Christmas fair event which took place in December. The Councillors decided that they would organised games on the stall 'Guess the amount of sweets in a jar' and 'Pin the nose on Rudolf'. They also created a Christmas card each to sell. The School Council managed the stall independently. The whole school raised just over £800. The school council stall was a great success!

In the Spring term we have been busy with all sorts of projects. We continued to remind the children to bring healthy snacks to school. We completed our assembly evaluations, making notes about our whole school worship and writing about the things that we have enjoyed in each assembly.

We made posters to encourage and remind us all to bring in tins and packets of food. These were collected by The Hope Centre and The Eve Family Refuge Project who were grateful for these donations for local families.

Our school council members held class council meetings to discuss changes to our KS2 shared area. They collected ideas which were then brought to our full school council meeting where we put our ideas together to present to Mrs Shilliam and the PTA.

We wrote a thank you letter to The Wilson Foundation who kindly donated generously towards our canopy for our playground. The children signed their letter using fingerprints characters of themselves. The canopy is amazing!

2017-2018

Our Year 6 representatives, Ben and Lily, have each had a turn serving as Vice-Chair and have been excellent examples to the other children, displaying great leadership skills! We have had 11 school council meetings, organised and taken 4 whole school assemblies and been involved in a range of events and activities in our school. We would like to tell you a little bit about some of the things we have been up to this school year… 

Mrs Shilliam asked the school council to organise the voting for our new house names. We created a ballot box and ballot papers and we officiated on the day, ticking off the names of pupils as they voted and making sure that every child was given the opportunity to vote. After the votes were counted and verified, we announced the results in a school council assembly.The new houses are now called after the Elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire.

We organised another whole school competition to design a school council logo for us to use during 2017-18. As a school council, we enjoyed looking at the entries and voted on the designs that we each liked the most. We chose a design by Maisie in Year 6 as the winner and her logo sits proudly on the front of our school council letter box, has been used in our school council assemblies and on official school council letters. Thank you Maisie for your fabulous design!

We noticed that our KS2 toilet signs were looking a bit old and tired. We decided to run a ‘design a sign’ competition and lots of children submitted bright and colourful designs. As a school council, we judged the wonderful collection of signs and selected a winner, a chess piece design by Isabel in Year 3! Isabel’s signs now take pride of place in our KS2 area. Well done Isabel!

As a school council we have discussed our lunchtime arrangements. Our cooks and lunchtime supervisors work hard to make lunchtime a lovely experience for us. We have looked at ways to improve our lunchtime routine so that everyone in our school can enjoy eating together.  This is something that we are continuing to monitor and as class representatives, we have been asked to discuss lunchtimes again with our class mates, to find out what they think is working well and what might still need to be improved. We will report back at our next school council meeting and consult with Mrs Shilliam to share thoughts and ideas from the children we represent.

We had an exciting school council visit in June. We met the Lord Mayor of Leicester at the Leicester Town Hall. This was a great opportunity for the children to meet members of Leicester Council and to have a look around the council offices and the Mayor’s Parlour. We learnt about how a city council works, the kinds of work they are involved in and how they run their meetings. 

Our school council children are enthusiastic, reliable and work together as a great team! They grow in confidence as we meet together to work on school projects, events and making our school even better. We are very proud of them, we enjoy working with them and listening to their thoughts and ideas.