Our School Council

• Our children put their names forward for election

• They wrote speeches and told us their qualities

• We listened carefully to each candidate

• We thought about who would represent us the best

• We voted for who we wanted to be Chair & Vice

Meet Our Chair and Vice-Chair 2019/2020

Chair- Emmie Adie-Carter

Vice-Chair- Melody Massey

Meet This Year's Councillors

At Newlands our school council provides a meaningful way in which pupils can voice their opinions and have their views taken into account in decisions which impact upon them. It is an important and useful way for us to provide leadership and development opportunities for our pupils.

Our school council plays a key role in promoting the key values which make up our British Values:

• Democracy
• Rule of law
• Individual Liberty
• Mutual Respect and Tolerance

Thoughts From last Year's Councillors

 "I've had so much fun at school council"

"I love being part of making decisions"

"I feel like I'm able to help say what happens"

"It makes me feel important coming to school council"

The School Council have worked extremely hard this year on behalf of their school and have made many positive changes;

Lunchtime

The School council listened to the children in their classes during class council meetings and it became very clear that a lot of children were unhappy with lunchtimes. As a council they sat down and discussed what they felt the key issues were and what we could do to make lunchtime a nicer place for everyone.

This is what they decided:

• Children want to be sat in table groups rather than rows so they can chat with each other and make lunchtime more sociable.
• Children wanted to choose who they sat with regardless of whether someone was dinners or sandwiches.
• The school council wanted children to have the same place and table so children would know where they were sitting and they could work together as a team to win points for politeness, good manners, cooperation, responsibility etc.
• Each week the table with the most points would be the 'Golden Table' the following week and enjoy special treats!

We decided that each table would have the name of a different inspirational person. So we researched possible people, created a final list, then finally gave each group a name and made a picture card of that person for each table.

What A Difference

The school council are extremely proud of what they have achieved. Lunchtime is a much more pleasant and sociable place to be, with children working cooperatively to build positive relationships and learn key life skills. 

School Council Surgery

Every week the school council take it in turns to run a school council surgery on a Friday break time. This is to provide an opportunity for children to share any issues, ideas, grumbles, suggestions etc. So that the school council can take these and discuss them or feed back to Mrs Castledine. It provides an opportunity for everyone to make their voice heard and be listened to.

Kindness

Most recently the school council have been discussing the issue of kindness within our school. As a school this has been something we have really been thinking about as part of our well being award. Nisha Holmes, who is a member of our school council, has been appointed as our School Kindness Ambassador to work alongside the well being committee.

We decided that if everyone in our school could just be that bit nicer, that bit more considerate, that bit more understanding, that bit KINDER, then our school would be an even better place to be than it already is! So we talked about how we could achieve this. We researched ideas, we shared and discussed ideas, we considered that we could implement really easily.

Finally we came up with the following ideas.....

5 Daily Kindnesses

We created a list of 'Five Daily Kindnesses' which we want everyone to try and do every day, as many as they can. The 'Daily Kindnesses' are:

• Compliment someone
• Smile

We also made posters to go up in each classroom, created a kindness display in the hall and sent our poster home to parents and carers.

5 Daily Kindnesses Display

Kindness Crew

As a school council we want to create a 'Kindness Crew'. This will be a group of children from across school who children will be able to go to if they are upset, concerned, worried, or just want someone to talk to. Anyone can put their names forwards to their class councillors, Mrs Boulton and Nisha Holmes will then decide who they think would make the best Kindness Crew members.