Our School Council Vision

All voices are equal.  

Our School Council Aims

Whilst living out the Christian values of love, courage, hope and service, as well as British values, our School Council works as a team to give every child the opportunity to have a voice. We believe that all voices are equal. Adults and children collaborate to ensure that St Margaret’s CE Junior School is a happy, healthy, safe and enriching learning environment where children are listened to and can share their thoughts and ideas to implement change to make our school the best it can be: a place where everyone in the school family can flourish.

Our message to all the children at St Margaret’s is:

We represent the voices of every child and promise to consider and value all suggestions and ideas with respect and integrity. We are proud to shine as your School Council representatives and are ready to show you how voices can make positive changes.

Our School Council likes to meet once a month usually at lunchtime where we share our thoughts and follow an agenda to discuss many topics which are relevant to our school family and the wider community. We talk about the ideas suggested from each classes shoe boxes. Each class has a shoe box where children are able to share their thoughts and ideas. Our School Council aims are to try to find ways and solutions to improve our school and wider community. Our school motto is that ‘All voices are equal’.

The School Council has a clear focus every academic year. This year our focus has been trying to ensure ‘The Six Big Ideas’ which is a whole federated school vision are implemented into our school. We began this process by asking each School Council representative to share trips and clubs they had enjoyed participating in and what other opportunities they would like to see considered. Each class had amazing ideas and the School Council agreed that as a school, we offered lots of amazing experiences. Each School Council representative also asked their class how we could find ways to continue to promote ‘The Six Big Ideas’ so we collated the suggestions and decided which ones we already achieved and which ones we wanted to focus on this year.

As a School Council, we agreed to focus on one of the big ideas which is called ‘Communities and Culture’. Our focus now is to try to help our wider community and find a way to celebrate different cultures with a vision of researching about a culture we know limited facts. The School Council discovered that there is a Cultural Style Week from May 21st to May 27th so we are now planning and preparing how we can celebrate cultural heritage with a focus on the country Ukraine. This decision was made by asking each class to vote from a list of five countries which country they would like to find out more about.

To help our wider community, we are planning to visit a local community centre where the School Council wish to try and form a partnership where we are able to give something back to the wider community. We have lots of ideas and we hope to promote this in the second part of the Summer Term. Watch this space!

What our School Council say...

“It’s like being a mini Prime Minister of the school,” Lara.

“We have lots of responsibilities to improve the school and we want to make a difference to our school,” Issy.

“We are like choice makers and we try to choose issues which will help make a difference to our wider community,” Zac.

“We want to ensure all our school voices are heard and everyone is treated equally,” Alex.

“We feel we have the opportunity to change things for the better,”Luxshan.

“It’s enjoyable, it’s fun to work with different children from different classes and year groups,” Raffi.

“It has helped to boost my confidence when having to share with my class what our School Meeting has been about,” Erin.

Visit from our local MP - October 2022

Our local MP, Matt Weston, visited St Margaret’s on Friday 21st October. Matt is a very keen cyclist, completing many charity cycle rides, and he visited the Federation to check out the success of our local Cycle Bus. He was highly impressed by this provision that provides families a healthy option for travelling to school.

Matt also attended our St Margaret’s Diwali Day worship sessions, where he learned about the importance of collective worship for our multi-cultural church school and also took questions from representatives from our School Council. The school community learned more about the importance of the British Value of Democracy. Matt was quick to put some very positive feedback about his visit on his social media and we look forward to welcoming him back to St Margaret’s really soon.

During his visit, Matt explained that he is an advocate for pupil voice and supporting young people to become agents of change. He encouraged the children to contact him should they ever wish him to raise questions in the House of Commons. Classes across the school will be considering how they can utilise our local MP’s support as part of their courageous advocates projects and curriculum work this year.