Tag: pupil voice

Whitecross PS P5/6/7 Fight plastic pollution.

Welcome to our blog post by p5/6/7 at Whitecross Primary school. We want to tell you about how we have been fighting plastic pollution down at our burn. Please click this link to view the first part of our presentation and this link to see the second part. Here are some of our thoughts:

Ruby “I really enjoyed this topic because there was fun activities to do such as: litter picking and a class protest”

Sophie “I really enjoyed doing this and loved doing the presentation”

Kylan “My favourite part about this was the litter pick and releasing the fish and picking up the litter.”

Lily – “I liked doing the presentation like Sophie everyone had good ideas and it was one of the times we were all working as a class and I really liked the litter pick.”

Grace “I really enjoyed doing the presentation with my classmates and I also enjoyed litter picking.”

Here’s what we learned from our work:

New French words.

That the plastic pollution in our burn could end up in the ocean.

How to stop plastic pollution.

An opportunity to share your thoughts about climate change

Falkirk Council has a Climate Change team led by an officer called Mari-Claire Morgan. This team includes 5 people who work with all services across the Council to help everyone use energy efficiently. The team help us all study climate change in lots of ways, but this blog post explains how they connect pupils from schools with our local politicians – also known as “elected members”. From August 2022, we want to make sure that more pupils from Falkirk schools can join in with these meetings between the Climate Change team and our politicians. The meetings will be organised so that pupils can share their own climate change projects, plus any worries or questions they have. This is one of the ways in which Falkirk Council and Falkirk Children’s Services want to make sure that the voices and ideas of pupils are listened to and acted upon. The articles of the UNCRC say that all pupils in Falkirk Council area have the right to be heard and to contribute to decisions about their education.

These meetings have a long and fancy name – they are called ” Climate Change All Stakeholder Working Group meetings”. The first two will take place on September 7th and November 11th 2022 between 3-4pm. A member of staff in each school will help pupils to join the Microsoft Teams meeting because it needs to take place outside Glow. Please speak to your form teacher or a member of your school’s senior leadership team if you would like to be one of the pupils who joins these online meetings. We feel it is very important that children and young people in Falkirk have an opportunity to share their thoughts about climate change and hope you think that this new opportunity is valuable.

Falkirk Children and Young People – Come and join our group!

In October 2021 around 300 children and young people from Falkirk Council schools met online for the first time. They chose to join this meeting because they wanted to have a voice and share their opinions about their education. Some of them were part of pupil voice or eco-groups in their own school, and others volunteered to come along as individuals. Many of these pupils care deeply about climate change and other issues which affect their lives and their education – they want to work together to change these things. The big group split into the 5 smaller groups below to make it as easy as possible for each young person to be part of the groups which interested them most:

A Voice for all – this group makes sure that the ideas and opinions of our very youngest learners are listened to
Young Activists – this group share their opinions and ideas about important decisions which affect children and young people across Falkirk
Guardians of climate change – this group are passionate about our environment and our planet and want to take action on climate change
Children’s Rights Matter – this group are busy making sure that everyone across Falkirk know about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1987) and all of its articles (Click here to find our more about your rights)
Leading the team – this group makes decisions about how to organise our work across all of the channel groups

Next school year the group want to meet face to face, at least once in each school term and their first meeting will be on 26th August 2022. The meetings will all take place during school time. This new blog was created at the same time as the group to make it easier for the group to communicate with other children, young people, parents and staff across Falkirk Council. We are writing this blog post to see if there are other children and young people who would like to join the Falkirk Children and Young People’s group. Please click here to fill out our contact form if you would like to join.

You might want to know more about what the group have done this year – so far we have:

Taken part in 4 whole group meetings and 1 other meeting in our channels
Met our new Members of the Scottish Youth Parliament for Falkirk
Learned how to take part in a meeting
Created logos for some of our channel groups
Used our Team to post messages to each other
Planned what we want to do following the COP 26 event in Glasgow 2021

We’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Information about our Falkirk Children & Young People’s group for parents and carers

Falkirk Children and Young People’s Group
All pupils in Falkirk have been hearing about an exciting new project which offers them an opportunity to get involved in a Council wide pupils’ group. This post offers more information if your child has shown an interest in being part of this group. Hopefully the information below will answer any questions you have about what this will involve.
What is the group?
At the moment the group is called ‘Falkirk Children and Young People’s Group but one of the first tasks for the group will be to agree what they want to be called! The group is being formed to make sure that children and young people are fully involved in making decisions about things that matter to, or affect them. Examples of this will include influencing Council policies, taking action on climate change and making progress towards Falkirk Net Zero. It will have a similar role to a school Pupil Council but at a whole Council level, and will help make sure that Children’s rights are built into all Council services.
How will it work?
Using Microsoft Teams within Glow (an on-line meeting platform) pupils and staff volunteers will discuss various projects, agree on actions and work out how to make these happen. Children and young people will be able to choose which projects they want to get involved in. The groups will be facilitated and supported by staff, but it is hoped that the children and young people will gradually take more responsibility for how these meetings are run.
How often will the group meet?
There will be different projects that individuals can get involved in and each group will decide how often they are going to meet on-line. It is likely that initially this will be once or twice each school term.
Will it be a safe environment for my child to meet others on-line?
Glow is a secure on-line environment for pupils and the Microsoft Team will be closely monitored by staff. All group members will have an introductory session, where they will be reminded about on-line etiquette and expectations, and this message will be reinforced regularly by staff.
Will taking part mean my child misses out on other classroom activities?
At the moment we don’t have further details about when the meetings will take place, or how long they will last, as we really want the group members to be making those decisions – it’s their group! However the meetings will initially take place during the school day, and this may mean your child being out of class. This is not unusual in schools as pupils take part in a wide range of opportunities outwith regular classes. Being part of this group will help your child develop skills for life and work as part of the wider curriculum provided by our authority.
Why would this be a good thing for my child to take part in?
Your child will have opportunities to develop leadership and communication skills as they connect with pupils from across Falkirk Council. Being able to influence and take action on things that matter to them will also build confidence and a sense of pride and self-esteem. They will be able to experience first-hand just how much of a difference they can make when working as part of a focussed team.
Hopefully this information has convinced you that the Falkirk Children and Young People’s Group would be a worthwhile project for your child to get involved with but if you have any further questions please get in touch.

Introducing Our Falkirk How good is OUR school Toolkit

Children and young people from Sheildhill, Laurieston and Bantaskin Primary Schools helped create a toolkit to make sure that pupils’ play a real part in the way their schools work. They made sure that the toolkit is easy to use. They spent time thinking about the kind of words to use so that the youngest children in our schools and early learning and childcare centres could understand the questions and give their answers.

The adults in your school or centre can find the toolkit documents here when they are logged in to Glow. They can share a Power Point presentation with you so that you can understand how to use the toolkit. There are 5 different sets of questions and these are arranged under the themes and colours above.

Each theme has questions like the ones below. Groups of children and young people read the questions in the toolkit then share their opinions about how well their school/centre does this.

The children and young people who designed the toolkit decided that traffic lights were the easiest way for them to show how well their school was doing. It their school/centre is doing well with a question they choose green, ok is amber and if lots of improvement is needed then it’s a red light. The children who’ve used the toolkit think it’s really important to write down the reasons for their answers too. Here is one of the tool kit sheets they helped to make.

We hope you get to use the toolkit soon. Some schools used it when it was time to decide how well they were doing and what they want to get better at. Sometimes pupil council or other groups use it to help them decide what they want to get better at too. Using the toolkit can help you make a plan for what you want to do and how you want to do it.

Please use the comments space below to tell us how you use it.