School Council 2024/2025
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.
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 29th 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.
