School Council

At Houghton Primary, we recognise that each child has a unique perspective on what it is like to be a pupil at our school. We are committed to listening to the views, wishes and experiences of all our pupils and value what they tell us. By involving them in decision making, we hope to bring about meaningful change and to facilitate within our young people a sense of empowerment and inclusion. 

We run a proactive School Council which enables the thoughts and opinions of all pupils to be valued, listened to, considered and acted upon. Our School Council also gives all pupils the opportunity to take part in democratic processes and the chance to lead and speak in formal situations. 

Our School Council is comprised of two representatives from each year group, who have been elected by their peers to represent them. These representatives are changed termly to allow more pupils the opportunity to be involved. 

The full School Council meets every fortnight to discuss an area taken from The School Development Plan. The representatives then spend the following week collecting the opinions and ideas of their classmates in the issue before feeding back to the full council. Once collated, the pupil’s voice is given to the School Leadership Team where it is acted upon appropriately. 

The Young Leaders display board is used to showcase the work of the School Council within school and parents are informed of their work within the school newsletter. 

We are very proud of our School Council and of all the leadership opportunities which we provide for all our pupils at Houghton Primary. 

Meet our School Council

School Council News

27th September 2024

This week, our pupils have prepared and presented speeches for elections to School Council. Pupils met to hear the
speeches and cast their votes and the following children have been elected to represent their year group:
Year 1: Orhi and Annabel
Year 2: India and Arthur
Year 3: Frankie and Jacob
Year 4: Bodhi and Erin
Year 5: Alice S and Holly
Year 6: Niall and Nora
We are looking forward to our first meeting next week!

3rd October 2024

School  Council met for the first time today. After learning about how the meetings will work, we started to look at our new focus of healthy eating.

In class assemblies next week, our School councillors will be asking their year group what they curently eat for breaktime snacks. They will be sharing their findings in our next meeting on the 17th of October

 17th October 2024

Well done School Councillors! They have done really well finding out what our pupils currently eat for their snacks. There was a real mixture between very healthy options and some less healthy choices- our no nut message had clearly got through to the children as no one was bringing snacks containing them in.

School Councillors have now been tasked with asking the children what they think a healthy snack is. We look forward to hearing their findings at the next meeting to be held on  Thursday 14th November. 

14th November 2024

This week the School Council Representatives met to share the discussions they had with their year groups. Most year groups had a good understanding of which foods are healthy, although we discussed that some foods can be marketed as being healthier than they actually are. Through the discussion it became clear that despite knowing what a healthy choice was, that many children were choosing unhealthy food options for their snacks. We have therefore set them the task of asking their classmates how we can help promote healthy snack options. We will meet up again to discuss their findings on Thursday 29th November

 6th December 2024

This week the School Council met up to discuss the ideas their classes had had to promote healthy eating at break times. We had lots of discussion and will meet up again to share more ideas.

16th January 2025

We completed sharing our ideas for promoting Healthy Eating and agreed to arrange a time for us to meet with Mr Spencer to get his feedback and plan a way forward.

 31st January 2025

We met with Mr Spencer to share our ideas and to discuss the problems the children had observed. He is happy for the School Council to launch their Healthy Eating Challenge in the next newsletter and told the children that he would let the parents know to look out for it in this week’s edition. 

14th February 2025

We have been very busy over the past few weeks creating a sign for our fruit bowl and writing an article for the school newsletter. Here is what we have written:

School Council Challenge

For the past term, we have been finding out about the snacks that we are bringing to school to eat during our break times. We found out that although we know what food is healthy, we are not always bringing healthy food to school. When we have been out on breaks, we have seen that many children are bringing in crisps, cakes, biscuits and even packets of sweets and chocolate bars.

We are worried about this because we have found out that eating too many sugary and fatty snacks can make it harder for us to learn, remember new ideas and concentrate in class. In addition it is not good for our fitness and health.  We have also noticed than most of the litter on the playground comes from crisp and snack wrappers.

School Council would like to challenge all children to try to have at least one healthy and natural snack each day. To help you achieve this, we will be providing a bowl of free fruit and veg for all children to enjoy. These healthy snacks will be placed outside of Kingfisher’s Class and will be looked after by School Council.

We hope that you will support us by helping your child to select a healthy option for their snacks.

School Council.

 We will be monitoring the chidlren’s snacks after half-term and hope to see more healthy options being enjoyed.