Our School Council

Winterslow School Council have a variety of key roles in school. We talk and lead on school improvement projects, take tours of prospective parents around the school, decide which charities to support and host open mornings. We are also really keen on promoting recycling and environment projects in school. 

Our Current Focus 2023-2024

Our Eco School

At Winterslow Primary School we are dedicated to encouraging our pupils to become ambassadors for change. Our individual ‘sparkly’ curriculum has been specifically designed to promote sustainability, with each year group researching and creating new initiatives to help support our environment. These are based on the sustainability goals and are designed to give our young people a voice and the chance to impact their future.

Caring for the environment is something we feel passionate about in school. We want every child to leave Winterslow with a real awareness of the local, national and global environment and how each one can make a huge difference to the quality of the environment for everyone. Looking after the environment and global issues are integrated into our curriculum.

Throughout the school year, children focus on our environment in a variety of ways where they can fit into the curriculum and then in term six across the whole school every class has an enquiry which has an environmental focus.

We cover a whole range of issues and topics including bio-diversity, energy, reusable plastic, healthy living and global citizenship in school and have previously been a Regional Expert Centre for the Global Learning Programme.

We are currently working towards achieving our Eco Schools Award. Please see below to view our ECO pledge, pupil voice board and action plan 

Sustainable schools link

We are also working with the schools in our academy to ensure we are all as sustainable in our practice as possible. School council members from each school will visit a partner school to see if they can exchange ideas to help develop their school.

PLACE project 

We are also working closely with PLACE to look at how we can better connect to our community and become advocates for change. (more information about our involvement with the PLACE project below)

If you would like to hear more, we have an interactive QR quest which explains all the work we are doing to help our environment.

Reviewing the behaviour policy and anti-bullying policy

We are reviewing our child-friendly behaviour policy and anti-bullying policy in line with our school rules 'ready, respectful, safe'.  We value their contributions to these documents and were proud of their approach to 'giving people time to make things right' as part of our behaviour policy and 'noticing and reporting the small things' about bullying. These are available to view on our website. 

Previous School Council projects 

Our School Council lead our recycling and charity efforts across the school. They set the agenda, help to plan our activities and ensure that everyone really makes a difference.

Some of our recent projects include adding recycling bins to every class, introducing crisp recycling and litter picking. Previously our School Council were involved in the introduction of Solar Panels on our school roof! Our School Council have stickers that they give children when they see them doing something Green eg saving electricity by turning a light off, reusing scrap paper, recycling a crisp packet etc.

Each year we support a different charity, in the past few years we have collected items for Samara Purse (women and children in Syria), recycled school coats for local families in need, taken part in 'spend a penny' for World Toilet day, toilet twinning and more.

Supporting Wiltshire Wildlife Trust - courageous advocacy 

The school council have chosen to become involved in a new initiative that supports Cancer Research UK through our local community. We are encouraging parents, children and our local area to donate pringles tubes, bread packets and chocolate wrappers to Winterslow Baptist Church-who will in donate to the charity. They were motivated to support this cause not only for the environmental benefits but the church will always donate money to Cancer Research for items collected and recycled.

What is the PLACE project?

As part of this we work closely with the PLACE project-

The PLACE project is in partnership with Cumbria DEC, Sever in the Czech Republic, DEED Dorset and Sosna in Slovakia.
The overall aim is to develop a pool of tools and resources to support schools and teachers in equipping and empowering children to become agents of local and global change, whilst building  resilience and becoming healthy global citizens. 

We have linked with a local environmental education centre and school in Slovakia.

 It was an honour and inspiration for three members of our staff to visit these places in 2022. We continue to work with some fabulous practitioners and to share their ideas and approach. We focused on the following areas:

Philosophy for Children - P4C develops the fundamental skill of being able to ponder and engage with deep questions about the world. P4C is about learning to think in Critical, Caring, Creative and Collaborative ways.

Questing – questing is an approach to interpreting local heritage. At the end of the quest treasure may be found! We have created a QR quest around our school to give our pupils and visitors information about all of our eco initiates. These include our uniform swap shop, information about how we use the solar power to charge our ICT equipment, what we recycle and why, how we look after our outside spaces and what we do within our community to keep it clean and tidy.

Natural and Therapeutic Gardening –Therapeutic gardening involves making use of green space and allowing children to have ownership of these spaces both in school and their local community. For example, the children have chosen to improve the quiet area gardens in our playground. Not only did our children respond really well to the opportunity to get covered in soil, many have since accessed the space afterwards as a calm area to sit and reflect. Our Key Stage Two children often take the opportunity to have a go at making mandalas which has encouraged them to examine colours, textures and shapes as well as connect to their local environment. Allowing the children to have a say in what they do in these spaces, allows them to connect with their local environment and in turn feel as though they can make an impact environmentally and identify needs. We also work together to tidy up our flowerbeds, plant bee friendly wild flowers and carry out regular litter picks around our local community.

Community Activism – this means engaging young people in issues, supporting them to reach out and link with their local communities, and empowering them so their voices can be heard.

International learning is something we are passionate about as a school and we look forward to developing this key area in our curriculum.