St Finbar’s School Council is made up of children from Year 1 to Year 6.
The school council’s aim is to collect the views of children around the school, and discuss ways to make St Finbar’s an even better place for all little learners.
“Our school council meets regularly and we talk about what we love about St Finbar’s, and what we’d like to change or keep the same.
The great things about our school are; seeing our friends after the weekend, being with the teachers, having a nice space to go to at lunchtime and the after school clubs!
The things we would like to change is to have harder or easier work and a swimming pool!
We love having a school council and helping make St. Finbar’s a happy and safe place to be!”
This year we now take part in Smart School Councils and are holding weekly class discussions led by our school councillors in each class. This poses a weekly question where the children get into groups and hold discussions before coming to a consensus and vote. The following week the classes will see the whole school results. The aim of this is to collect pupil voice frequently and support the development of oracy skills for all children.
This week the school council have begun to develop certain initiatives that will be rolled out across school before the Christmas break. These include, recycling poster to highlight what goes into the food wast bins, slides for an assembly on recycling and designing a suggestions box. We have used our meeting time to start these projects and will continue them next week.
This week we held our first Smart school council class discussion and we discussed the need for vegetarian options on our lunch menu and why it’s important. Then we held discussions in groups about ideas for new lunch options which are vegetarian.
A new exciting initiative is being bought into life at St Finbar’s to support school council and children’s oracy skills. Miss Summers held our training during the school council meeting to show us how to use the Smart School Councils tool. Our meetings will now focus around one key question and will be held every week in class.
Our KS2 school councillors and upper KS2 school buddies were invited to join a webinar that was held with schools across Liverpool to discuss their understanding of mental health and if they know what is available to support school if needed. The children were given the opportunity to talk about and consider now people need different types of support.
To kick start the school year we have begun with completing the school council applications and carrying out our class speeches. The children first decided if they wanted to apply and then completed the application form. Then they stood up and spoke to their class about what they felt they could do if they were voted into the council.
Using our British Value of the democracy, we listened to the candidates and their proposals becoming our class representatives at school council meetings. Then we voted for our winners.
This week we had a ‘no pen’ day, we still completed all our lessons and had some fun along the way! We learned about telling the time, about the Stone Age and we planted some pea seeds.
Today the school council have held a meeting with Mrs J P Conley to discuss their idea of having a ‘No pen’ day. They discussed how they feel we could have a day with no writing and focus on using other skills such as speaking, art and computing to complete the learning across the day.
Mrs J P Conley asked us questions about what learning would be taking place and considered our idea. She agreed there was a way for learning to still take place with lessons having activities that record down in other ways. For example, using our computing skills in English to type out our sentences and paragraphs.
On 23rd April, we will be having a ‘No pen’ day with no writing!
Today we voted for our school councillors ? congratulations to our new school councillors,we know you will be fabulous in representing the children of Year 2 #StFinbarsSchoolCouncil
