Our School Council: Rights Ambassadors
Article 2: All children have the right to their RIGHTS - no matter what!
Article 12: All children have the right to a voice and be listened to
Our school council is a formal group of pupils who act as representatives of their classmates in discussing school issues with the Mrs Bailey (Head) and Miss King (School Council Facilitator). It’s a brilliant way of representing and contributing to Pupil Voice in our school. Students are elected to represent the views of all students and also to improve our school.
They help to make decisions about how our school is run and take on projects that support the children’s learning and development, such as organising charity events, representing the school at outside events or ensuring the school is environmentally friendly. Our school council are elected in a democratic process. Children stand for election, make a manifesto speech to their class and a vote is held. This is one of our core British Values - Democracy.
This year our school council are focusing on introducing children's rights to our school. All children in the world have rights - no matter what! - and these are listed in The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). In fact, Article 12 of the UNCRC says that children and young people should have a say in decisions that affect their lives. So our school council provides a meaningful way in which pupils can voice their opinions and have their views taken into account in decisions that impact upon them.
Our school council will be talking about rights to their classes and supporting the teaching of rights in assemblies. Each class will then make a list of rights that they would like to focus on in school and their school councillors will bring their suggestions to meetings, where the most popular will become our school focused rights. Even though we will have our focused school rights, all children's rights will be respected in school. We will be learning about ensuring we have rights for ourselves, but also ensuring we are respectful that other's receive their rights too.
Our School Council: Rights Ambassadors are: Brody, Jasper, Joel, Kelyn, Alyssia, Charlotte and Otis.
You can see our school council meeting minutes below.
Our whole school contributed to choosing these five articles from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to focus on.
Article 12 - Right to a Voice, Article 15 - Right to meet with friends and join clubs, Article 28 - Right to an education, Article 29 - Right to be the best you can be and Article 31 - Right to relax and play.
Our whole school learnt about many rights in assemblies. In assembly, we made a long-list of the rights the children wanted to focus on in school and then School Council: Rights Ambassadors chose the final five. See the PowerPoint below from this assembly.
Following this a whole school charter was created– an agreement, with all signing up to respect our own and other’s rights. This was designed by our School Council: Rights Ambassadors. Children chose handprints in the shape of a rainbow to reflect being part of the Rainbow MAT family and handprints to be inclusive. All children in our school could sign up with a handprint.
Children do not have any responsibility in order to access their rights as rights are unconditional.
Children are the Rights Holders and adults are the Duty Bearers to uphold children’s rights.
Our charter is not a set of rules, but is a visual reminder of our agreement; to strive to develop responsible behaviours through respecting our rights and those of others.
Penponds School is a Rights Respecting School.
As part of two of our focused rights, Right to a Voice and Right to an Education, we are asking our school community to help us name our new school curriculum and design a logo once we have decided on the new name. See the poster to contribute below!
Happy 10th Birthday Rainbow MAT!
We celebrated our trust birthday in school with a rainbow dress up day, birthday cake and parties in school! Our oldest and youngest Rights Ambassadors helped to cut the cake. We even set off eco-friendly rainbow cannons. Here's to the next 10 years!
Rights Respecting Schools Award - Bronze Level
We received notification that all of our work on raising the awareness and teaching explicitly about children's rights has been recognised by UNICEF! They have awarded us our Bronze Award and have also asked us to send in evidence already towards the silver award, because they think we have already achieved this!
Huge thanks to our School Council: Rights Ambassadors and all the children and staff of Penponds.
Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal
Our two oldest School Council: Rights Ambassadors represented Penponds at the Royal British Legion Youth Remembrance Service on Friday 10th November 2023 at Camborne Parish Church and War Memorial. The service which remembered the fallen of both World Wars and all conflicts since, respected those with traditional prayers leading towards the eleventh hour, Last Post, Reveille and poppy wreath laying.
On Monday 13th November children who attend groups like cadets, guides, brownies etc came to school in their uniforms. We held our Remembrance service, marked the silence and learnt all about Armistice Day.
Sponsored Reading Challenge - Books, books and more books!
Thank you to all who took part in the sponsored reading challenge. Our oldest School Council: Rights Ambassadors counted up the money raised this week. The whole School Council had previously chosen the books they would like to purchase, so after totting up the money raised, the books were ordered. We also had another surprise donation this week of quite a lot of money, from Alyssia, Esmee and Jaxon so we will be ordering even more books with this donation.
If you still haven't handed in your donation money or would like to complete the challenge still, please do so and bring in your money raised. All monies are renewing our books stocks in the library. We are also purchasing a selection of Dyslexia friendly books too.
Coronation Prep with ex-pupil Les
Our School Council: Rights Ambassadors, met with Les who was a pupil at Penponds in 1953 for the coronation of Elizabeth ll. Our School Councillors asked Les lots of questions to find out how Penponds School celebrated the coronation back in 1953 so that we can plan to celebrate in similar way for King Charles lll's coronation in May. It was really enjoyable to chat with Les and we even managed to look at some really old photographs and squeeze some football chat in too! Thank you so much to Les for giving up his time to come into school to chat with us again.
Visit our Personal Development page for more info on how we celebrated Les' 80th birthday and how this working partnership came to be.
Well done to our School Council: Rights Ambassador children! They attended and represetned the CRF Youth Conference at the Fibre Hub. They were a perfect ambassadors for our school and contributed to issues affecting our local community.
Message from George Le Hunte:
Thank you for attending our 2022 CRF Youth Conference at the Fibre Hub on Friday. 57 students, plus staff, were there from 10 Camborne & Pool schools. It was a wonderful event in a great venue. Please thank all your students that attended for their brilliant engagement in the conference & for their immaculate behaviour. I am sure they learnt a lot and I hope they pass that on to all their colleagues at school.
Thank you for partaking in our Youth Conference.
George Le Hunte
Camborne Regeneration Forum
