School Council 2024/2025

Summer Term 2

The Summer term has been a busy one as always for the School Council. In the first half of the term, our community focus revolved around a visit from Cllr Gemma Furnival from Fareham Borough Council. As well as talking with the children about her role, Gemma also tasked the children with gathering suggestions from their friends about local park facilities and in particular ideas for developing the area in front of the former Westbury Manor Museum. While we're not sure that this area has the space for a full water park with slides (!) it was good to know that the children's voices are being heard and to give them the opportunity to advocate for the future of their own community.

This advocacy has been very much the theme within school also, as the School Council have actively visited different areas of the school to find out what 'inclusion' looks like at Redlands and have also shared and discussed with their peers the key words which will form our school values here at Redlands. The children had some great contributions to offer about what these values might look like within the daily life of the school and we will be using their ideas as part of a display in the Autumn term to help the newest and youngest members of our community to understand what it means to be a Redlands pupil.

Finally, we were delighted that so many of our school councillors were able to come and help run our stall at the recent Summer Fair. This was a really fun end to the year and many of the children discovered their inner sales-person!

I would like to thank each and every one of our School Councillors this year for the commitment and high standards they have shown in representing their peers and our school in the wider community. Well done!

Summer Term 1

Back in February half term, when we ran our unicorn trail, one of our local councillors got in touch. She was excited to see our school council getting involved in the community and asked if we would be able to help her find out what children thought about local issues. Today, after explaining in assembly what the role of the local council is, she met with our school councillors and tasked them with finding out what the rest of the school think about Fareham Town centre, particularly about the park and what activities they would like to see for children. The children are looking forward to discussing these issues with their classmates and will meet again on 7^th May to feedback their ideas to be considered when the council make plans for the future. This has been a really exciting opportunity for the children to experience first hand the role they can play in shaping our local area.

Spring Term 2

The school council have been as busy as ever this half term, canvassing opinions from the children on the ever-important topics of safety and behaviour. The councillors did an excellent job of representing their classmates' views, with the majority of children reporting positively that they feel safe at school for a number of reasons.

The children met with Mrs Sue Montgomery, our well-being governor, to feedback their findings. The children gave some well thought out and mature answers, recognising that the way we behave is affected by the way we feel and by the different relationships we have with others. The children's openness and honesty about their classmates views have given the staff team an insight into what works and what doesn't from the children's perspective, allowing us to explain, support and make changes where necessary to improve things further. This is real advocacy for their peers and we have been very proud of them for this.

Mrs Montgomery also asked the children how they feel about school and how they would like people to feel about Redlands - we feel that our school vision statement in the future should reflect this quote from our Head Girl, who said "I would like people to feel happy, respected, educational, safe and like it's family."

Many of you will also have supported our book sale, in aid of our community project this half term. The money raised has funded the creation of some story sacks which we will be sharing with the children at Little Angels Pre-School on the week commencing Monday 31st March a few of which you can see here. As you can see, some of our school councillors have been working hard to put these together, even learning a new skill of ironing under Mrs Hughes watchful eye. We hope the Pre-School children find the contents as exciting as we did.

Spring Term 1

During Spring Term 1, the children have been discussing the issue of how to encourage people to read for pleasure. This provoked some interesting discussions, particularly around the children’s frustration when they are getting into a book in class and then have to move on to something else. The children were very excited to be asked their opinion by Mrs Ainsworth about getting a new reading den or outside library – hopefully they will all be pleased with her final choice!

The children also came up with a list of book recommendations for their friends, which covered quite a range of authors and genre, both recent books such as those by David Walliams and real classics like ‘The Wind in the Willows.’

However, during Spring Term 1, the School Councils main focus was our community fundraising for Abby’s Heroes. One of our school councillors, Isabelle, shared with her friends why this charity is so important to her and everyone has got on board to help raise as much money as possible. This started with a cake sale and continued with their half term unicorn trail.

As well as writing to all the Headteachers in Fareham asking them to let their schools know about the event and picking out names for the unicorns to spell out our very important secret message (which even the children didn't know), on 29^th January the whole school council walked to the Crafty Makery in Fareham to paint the unicorns which will be on display. This was a real showcase of the care our children show to each other, as the older school councillors made sure the younger ones were buddied up on the walk and helped them with aprons before starting their own painting.

In total an amazing £270.56 was raised from the Unicorn Trail that took place. Thank you to everyone who took part and to the school council for the idea and organisation of the event.

Autumn Term

This term our new School Councillors helped support the Shoe box scheme. The idea of this scheme it to provide children in deprived or war torn areas with something to open at Christmas which will also support their needs in practical ways.

The Councillors have been very busy putting together the shoe boxes together and in total, we managed to fill 8 shoe boxes as a school, in addition to any personal ones donated. A total of 17 boxes were donated. Thank you to all our parents and carers for supporting this cause.