Author: Mrs Lowden

A wonderful group of young people ready to be the pupil voice of our school and drive forward school improvement. Congratulations to all our JLT members. 

Today we met to discuss various agenda items that we had taken back to our class after the previous meeting.  The first of these was what charity the pupils in our school wanted to donate £100 to.  At the last meeting we had narrowed this down to 4 possibilities and the classes voted and the majority of children decided they would like to donate £100 to a local charity supporting people with cancer. We will now get a cheque for £100 and the Pupil Council will hand this to the Maggies Centre in Dundee.

The Reps also fed back that their peers were delighted at the prospect of getting tracks painted on the playground and scooters being bought for all ages and stages and that this was a great use of the money raised.  Mrs Lowden explained that the tracks were being painted during the April holidays and the scooters would hopefully be purchased next week. P7 PC reps are going to put together a letter for Halfords asking if it would be possible to donate some helmets or discount our scooters as we are buying so many.

Steve from Play on Wheels came in to discuss with our council the ‘Open Playground Initiative’ which is being piloted in our school after the holidays. Steve explained that this would involve opening our school gates every Wednesday afternoon 3.30-5pm and allowing free play for all children in our school. This event is not run by our school but simply makes use of our school grounds and allows our families to come and play together.  Steve asked us what activities/games/resources we would like to see at this ‘play event’ and we gave him lots of great ideas. We all agreed that we would encourage our friends and peers to make use of this great opportunity for outdoor play and creativity and many of us agreed we would like to come along too.

This week at our meeting we had lots to discuss. Mrs Lowden asked us to brainstorm some questions that we would like to ask the rest of our peers about school. These questions will be used to put together a Pupil Survey for every pupil in our school and then Mrs MacPhail and Mrs Lowden will look at the results and use them to improve our school. We were also asked to come up with 4 charities that we could take back to our classes and vote on which one we will donate £100 to (from funds raised at Christmas). We updated our council on how things were going in our classes with the new Reading for Enjoyment initiative and agreed we would check in at the end of this term to see have we made an improvement in this area.  We brought all our questions/suggestions from our peers to the meeting and these were all answered/discussed and left for us to feed back to our classes.

Our wole school came together in assembly to discuss how we learn and the challenges and obstacles we may face along the way. Mrs Lowden then introduced us to the Learning Pit, which is a really good way of describing the journey we take on a daily basis in school. We discussed how at the start of every learning journey, we may be feel a variety of different emotions – excited, anxious, motivated, nervous etc. Then, because learning should be challenging for us, we may feel like giving up but at some points, but it is when we are at the bottom of the ‘pit’ that the real learning takes place and when we have to use our Growth Mindsets and the strategies we have learned to get ourselves ‘out of the pit’. It can also be that our teachers and classmates help to ‘pull us out’ and this is ok too. All of these feelings and emotions along the way then result in our feeling of great achievement when we manage to get to the top of the Learning Pit and at this point we have achieved our goal and can help others to do the same.

The videos below help to explain how we are feeling in our learning journeys. Our pupil council also made a display for our school corridor to highlight this journey for us.

Learning Pit                A School’s example of The Learning Pit

We met to discuss the importance of our School Improvement Plan (SIP for short) and how this matters to us, the pupils of St Ninian’s. We got into groups and each group looked at one of our SIP targets for this year and then made notes on how we feel we are doing trying to achieve these targets. They were then displayed on the Pupil Council noticeboard and we were given the job of letting all of our classmates see what we had done. Mrs Lowden also reminded us that it is our job to feed back all of this information to our classes, and the best time to do this is within a few days of having had the meeting. We also created a Pupil Voice board where any pupil in our school can write up suggestions of things they want discussed at meetings. We need to make sure that all pupils know where this board is and why it is there. Mrs Lowden then said we would discuss these things at our next meeting and feed back to our classes any updates.

SIP for pupils

September saw us welcome our new group of Pupil Council Representatives. We had a great meeing – outlining what are aims were for this year, what each other’s roles are and how we can improve our school. Mrs Lowden made it clear to us that we are the ambassadors for St Ninian’s Primary School and we have a voice for all of our peers. We brainstormed how we could best improve our school and we then shared these ideas with our classes when we fed back to them. We discussed the importance of keeping the pupil council board up-to-date with agendas and minutes from meeting and how it was our job to ensure all pupils in our school felt like they had a part in taking forward our school community. We got our pictures taken and displayed on the board and we were presented with our Pupil Council badges.