Birley Primary Academy’s School Council is a group of children who are elected to represent the views of all pupils in order to improve our academy.
Our School Council is made up of 17 members – 1 child from every class in Year 1 – Year 6, who are elected by their classmates.
The role of the School Council is to help make important decisions at the academy (including teacher recruitment and school menu choices) and to be the voice of the children by representing the views of all pupils. Most importantly, they are responsible for carrying out the ideas and actions that they have agreed upon.
The School Council meets with Mrs McAughey, Headteacher, every two weeks to discuss issues and make decisions. These may include such things as: improvements to the school setting and playtimes, ideas for charity fundraising and showing around new members of staff and visitors.
To be an effective group, each child has a different role in the council. We have a Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, Publicity Officers and Class Representatives. They all have different jobs to do and have to work together as a team in order to get things done.
The School Council is an exciting and meaningful part of school and the children who are elected are very proud of their responsibilities. Our School Council do a fantastic job and we are very proud of our children that take part!
School Council Members for the 2023-2024 academic year are:
Year 1 – Ellie and Logan
Year 2 – Noah, Florence and Albie
Year 3 – Tiana, Evie and Jake
Year 4 – Lucas, Corrinne and Isobel
Year 5 – Harry, Freya and Lexi
Year 6 – Isla, Alex and Millie
To download The Birley Primary Academy School Council Vision Statement and list of roles and responsibilities, please click here
What have we been doing this year?
During the autumn term, we have worked closely with Jayne Furniss, the academy’s chef, in order to improve the academy’s lunch offer by ensuring that the new menu incorporating meals that children like throughout the academy. To begin this process, we hosted whole class discussions that asked our class about their favourite foods. Then, working alongside Jayne, we tried to put these on the menu. As a school council, we were happy that we managed to get chicken goujons back on the menu as well as gammon on a Wednesday when we have our roast dinner.
Further to this, we have been working with Sheffield City Council, Safer Parking Attendants and South Yorkshire Police on a ‘Good and Bad Parking Scheme’. Councillors have attended our meetings and we have discussed parking around the local area. We have designed tickets that we will be placing onto cars to say well done for parking safely around the academy.
This term, we asked all the children in school to vote on their Top Ten favourite things about our academy. We created a tally for each class and put all of the results together to create a ‘Birley Top 10’ leaflet. These leaflets are proudly on display throughout the academy and we enjoy sharing them with visitors and new children who join us in order to show them all of the things we love about our academy. Please visit our ‘Birley Top 10’ page to find out more about this project alongside access to the finished piece of work.
As a group, we have also worked hard upon developing extra-curricular activities at Birley Primary Academy. To achieve this, we surveyed our class members in order to find out what after-school clubs they would like to see adding to what we do already. We were pleased to report that children in our classes were very positive about the amount of clubs we have on offer and really enjoy taking part in them. More importantly, children reported that they like the people who run our after-school clubs. However, some ideas from children throughout the academy for other clubs included:
- Commando Joe’s Secret Mission Club
- Chess Club
- Art Club
- Cooking Club
- Board Game club
- Lego Club
- Reading Club
- Computing Club
- Singing Club
As a result of this feedback we have increased the amount of clubs on offer and children are now enjoying clubs including engineering, calligraphy, photography and architecture. Moving into the spring term, we look forward to introducing clubs involving computing, cooking and secret missions!