School Council

Meet The School  Council Team 2023-2024

Our Role

In Britain our voice matters. We can take part in decisions that affect our country. We may not be able to vote until we are grown ups but we begin to understand democracy in different ways at school. The school council is one of these ways. We are democratically elected and are involved in making choices and decisions for our school.

We call this "People Power".

We have regular school council meetings where we discuss problems and help to make important decisions.

We help to look after our school, the environment and when we have new children we look after them and show them around our school.

School Council 2023-2024

September 2023

Agenda: This half term, we learnt about our new roles and responsibilities as school councillors.  We talked about how they became a school councillor by all of the children in their class having a democratic vote to make it fair, this links in with British Values. 

Impact: The new school councillors are clear on their role and are excited to help to make our school an even better place!

October 2023

Agenda: School council team received their special badge and we located our display in the entrance hall. We then spoke about how important it is to be a school council member and that we should set a good example around school. Then we spoke about what our sorts of jobs we will be involved in throughout the year.

Impact: The children know what their role as school councillor will involve and have talked through examples of what they might do moving forwards. 

November/December 2023

Agenda: The school council team got together to discussed any issues around school. Each child had a chance to speak whilst holding the listening stone and we came up with a few different issues. The main issue that came up was lunchtimes as some litter had been dropped on the floor and the noise in the hall is too loud for some children. Firstly we decided to go and inspect the outside area and help make our school a tidy environment.

Impact: To give every child a voice and to make our school environment a clean and calm place to be.

January 2024

Agenda: The children came up with a lunchtime reward system so we met with Mr AJ and he loved the idea. He suggested we tell everyone in Assembly and start it straight away.

Impact: To encourage children to work together to ensure lunchtimes are enjoyable for everyone.

March 2024

We met up on the bus to discuss how the bus is looked after and treated. We agreed that some children do not look after the bus well. The books are not put back where they belong, the toys are left all over the bus and the children run up and down the bus. We decided to create some Library Bus Rules as a team. 

April 2024

We spoke about how lots of staff will be changing at Pinewood as lots of adults are leaving to have babies! We will be having some new staff coming to work with us at Pinewood. We thought of ideas to help new staff feel welcomed into Pinewood. Together we had an idea of making a book all about Pinewood. 

May 2024 

Mr Tutin (new Jag teacher) came to see us, so the school councillors shown him our new staff book. They talked him through the book explaining all the areas of school, the classes and our values. Mr Tutin loved the book! The children told Mr Tutin if he has any questions they could find them and ask away!

May 2024

We discusses clubs at Pinewood. We talked through our current clubs and discussed whether we'd like to keep them or not. We then came up with club ideas. One club we thought of was Karate club. We then realised that we do not have any teachers here at Pinewood that know how to teach Karate. So the clubs we decided to suggest are -

• Baking Club
• How to draw Club
• Music Club
• Gymnastics Club (Suggest to Mr Mitchell) 

June 2024 

In our meeting, we discussed lunch times. The children were saying how some children still do not always listen to the dinner staff, its too noisy in the hall and the children do not look after the equipment. We discussed if the 'Fantastic' Letters were working in which we had mixed reviews. So in the end, we decided to keep the letter but make suggestions for the rewards to encourage children to follow the rules. Here are our ideas- 

• Play on the decking (Year2)
• Watch an episode of a programme 
• Colouring 
• Making something to take home
• Eating delicious snacks

June 2024

Reading Camp is coming up at Pinewood! We discussed prizes we receive for our reading throughout the year and how we could encourage children to read more at home. School council had some ideas to get Pinewood children reading more at home - going to see Ms Otter when you've been reading lots, more prizes when working through the reading track, put names in a pot if you have read more than 3 times and draw one person out to receive a chocolate which is the idea we have selected! We discussed reading camp and why we like it and what ideas we have for it. Our ideas were - to make food connected to a story, watch part of a movie, go on the library bus, make a character from the story. We will put these ideas forward to the teachers ready for reading camp!

 June 2024

Here at Pinewood, we have a Pinewood Promise! We wanted to check if our Pinewood Promise is up to date with things we are doing in school and check if we have achieved the promise! We worked through our school promise and realised that we have achieved most of the school promise. Some things we have not done every year. For example, some years we have not been able to have a water fight due to the weather. Our favourite promises are - Working with an artist, looking after animals and our famous water days! 

July 2024

This morning KS1 had an emergency assembly to talk about looking after our school. School council decided to get together to discuss what we could do to help. We spoke about things that are happening at lunch time and playtime and thought of some ideas to help the Pinewood children look after school. We settled on the idea of making posters. The posters would have playtime rules and ways to look after School.

School Council 2022-2023

September 2022

Agenda: This half term, we learnt about our new roles and responsibilities as school councillors.  We talked about how they became a school councillor by all  of the children in their class having a vote to make it fair, this links in with British Values. 

Impact: The new school councillors are clear on their role and are excited to help to make our school an even better place!

October 2022

Agenda: Today the children received their special school councillor badge and helped to put up a display in the school entrance. We talked about the importance of our role and what it will involve. We spoke about the sorts of jobs that we may do next term. 

Impact: The children know what their role as school councillor will involve and have talked through examples of what they might do moving forwards. 

November/December 2022

Agenda: This week, we talked about how we take part in many fundraising events at Pinewood. As a team, we shared lots of ideas on what we could do to raise money for the Christmas Fair. We then fed back to Mrs Anthony who runs the fair an asked how we could help support her. 

Impact: We raised over £1,000 at the fair and it was a huge success!

January 2023

Agenda: Today the school council team had a meeting to discuss if there were any problems around school. Each child had a chance to talk while holding the talking stone and they came up with a few different issues. eg: lunchtimes are loud, we may need more rules, can we help with any painting outside? There is lots of rubbish in the bushes. We have decided to speak to Mr AJ about what we can do to improve lunchtimes, ask Miss Otter about the painting and we are having a whole school litter pick next month which has been arranged by our amazing eco team.

Impact: We will work together to make our school even more amazing!

February/March 2023

Agenda: Miss Otter would love many more children to come to our wonderful school and asked us to think of some ways to show others how great we are. From this we decided that would like to show off some of our amazing artwork we do at Pinewood by displaying it in our local community. We spoke about where might be a good place to display our artwork and thought that Killisick Post Office would be a good place. Then we worked together to write a letter to send to the Post Office. We also decided to make some posters. We also voted on which artwork we would like to send. 

Impact: Raise numbers in school. 

May 2023

Agenda: This week the School Council team had a very important job to prepare and deliver questions to teachers who would like to work at our school. On Tuesday 23^rd May the school council met with the new teachers and asked them some questions. Once they had questioned all teachers they met with Ms Otter to give her some feedback.

Impact: To find the perfect Pinewood person to work in our school.

School Council 2021-2022

A huge big thank you to a wonderful school council team - you have had the best ideas and have helped run our school brilliantly! Thanks so much love Ms Otter xx

September 2021

This half term the school council team have been getting familiar with their role and understanding the responsibilities involved. The children now understand that they are representatives of their classmates in discussing school issues which helps give our children at Pinewood a voice. We have discussed how they become a school council member by a democratic process of election, this means all children from each class have a vote. 

October 2021

During a meeting the school council team had noticed a playtime issue.

At playtime the football pitch is very busy and lots of children want to join in with football at once so we had a discussion to see how we could help resolve it. We came up with a few different ideas and decided that we would take it in turns on the pitch and make a timetable allowing each class to have a day on the football pitch. We will meet again after half term and see if our timetable is working. 

November 2021

One of our important jobs is to help Mrs Anthony who is the events coordinator with different fundraising events throughout the year. So first of all, we had a meeting to talk about fundraising and charities so we could have a better understanding of what it means. We then met with Mrs Anthony to share ideas and find out how we could help support Children in Need.  

January 2022

This term we will be checking to see if the football rota at playtime is helping to resolve our issue. Then we will be looking at our next fundraising event Red Nose Day and thinking of any ways we can support this event.

March 2022

We have centred our school council work around the library bus and how we can organise the bus so that people use the author boxes properly and get to know about the authors. We discussed making a new rule about author box books not going downstairs. School council have taken information back to the classes regarding the authors and are going to talk to their teachers about it. Ms Otter is going to run some assemblies around the authors too and then we will discuss this again the first week back after Easter.

April 2022

The Queen's Jubilee was the theme of school council this month. We discussed what councilors knew about the Queen and it was ascertained that she ‘is the ruler of the country’, she was ‘born into royalty’ and that she is the ‘leader of the monarchy’. It was discussed that children probably know a little bit about the Queen but would need more information to really understand what she does and why she is the Queen. We decided on actions to celebrate the Jubilee. Everyone is very excited! The year 2s also agreed to perform on stage at the Jubilee event at Arnot Hill Park. We had a few items this month on AOB initiated by councilors including story time, litter pickers and it was reported by one councilor that 3 girls had been working really hard on a dance and wanted to show Miss Otter so that was arranged as soon as the meeting finished.

May 2022

Agenda: Response to parent/carer questionnaire

This week discussed the response by a parent in our questionnaire. We discussed the PE clubs we offer and the fact that we have 2 PE clubs after school which are very well attended but we discussed why some children do not attend. It was felt that some parents find after school club hard to collect from when they have other siblings to collect at the end of the school day. We discussed that some families like their tea time early and that some children cannot come as they’re going to their own out of school club. Councilors decided that we would start to run some lunch time clubs and some after school clubs so that we can encourage everyone to attend in KS1 even those that cannot go after school. I told the councilors that 1 parent commented on a survey of having a variety of clubs in school like we used to have before Covid. We prioritised PE clubs during the past 2.5 terms but it might be nice to run other clubs as well moving forward. Councilors came up with the following ideas for clubs for Summer or Autumn term:

We decided that Summer term was very busy with water fight day, residential, school trips and lots of other things so this would probably begin in the autumn term. Councilors with the help of Ms Otter to write to the teachers and TAs asking for volunteers.