School Council
Our school council at Parc Eglos plays a vital role in fostering democracy and collaboration among students. Elected by their peers, council members represent the voices of their classmates, bringing forward ideas and concerns to improve the school environment.
Our school council does a number of things:
- A school council usually meets once a fortnight, with a teacher present, to discuss and sort out issues. These could include school lunches, behaviour or ideas for fundraising events. When more pressing matters need to be discussed, we do call extra school council meetings.
- Members of the school council are responsible for carrying out the ideas that have been agreed upon, such as planning discos and making changes to our school environment.
- Each year, every year group will elect representatives to be members of the school council.
- At Parc Eglos, our school council believe that pupil voice is incredibly important in making decisions, so they ask children from across all classes to vote, depending on what the focus issue is.
Why do we need a school council?
Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) says that children and young people should have a say in decisions that affect their lives. A school council can provide a meaningful way in which pupils can voice their opinions and have their views taken into account in decisions that impact upon them. Evidence and experience from schools all over the country shows that a school council that is supported and nurtured helps to improve many aspects of school life. It’s an important and useful way for schools to provide leadership and development opportunities for their pupils.
Meet our school councillors 2024-25
Year 2 – Elsie and Ava
Year 3 – Arthur and Florence
Year 4 – Florence and Saxon
Year 5 – Eva and Alba
Year 6 – Mollie, Alanna and Nelly
Recent school council successes
Team points – Children felt that we needed a re-focus on the use of house points and so have thought creatively about how this can be displayed in a place where everyone can see it (in the hall) and how teaching staff and support staff could celebrate further the team that wins each week or half term. Every child in the school is now in a house team, which is new for the last academic year.
World Book Day events – the school council felt that they wanted another event running alongside the Book in a Jar and Get Caught Reading competition, so they came up with some other ideas. They asked their peers to vote (using stickers) for either a best dressed competition or ‘stop, drop and read’. The children of the school voted for the best dressed competition, and we held this event on World Book Day, with each class picking one winner and that child winning a handmade bookmark.
Hall display – the councillors have decided that they would like to link one of our environmental pledges (the Veggie Vindicator) to a display above the canteen in the hall. They got creative and came up with the idea to display the superhero Veggie Vindicator alongside plates and cutlery, with the whole school creating fruits or vegetables to go alongside. The school council put it to vote: paint or collage the foods and asked children in the school to vote in a post box using coloured slips.
School council action plan – The children in the school council decided that they wanted to write an action plan for each term of the school year, so that we could clearly see progression with the things they had planned and implemented. Our Chair of Governors met with the children and they shared their action plan. During this academic year, we plan to make more links with our council governor and work with the community on some new projects.
