Grove-School-Council

Our year 5 and 6 school councillors started off the meeting by sharing their ideas for road safety week 2019. They presented their ideas with the help of a powerpoint they had created.

• Parksafe banner design competition.
• Walk to school cards (similar to the cop swap idea).
• Early years children to practise their road safety skills by using the bikes in the playground.
• Year 1 and 2 children to learn the road safety song ‘Stop, Look, Listen and Think’.
• Year 3 and 4 children to find hidden cards in the class room, create poems and songs about road safety and create badges with road safety pledges.
• Year 5 and 6 children will be asked to write home to their parents and carers explaining how important road safety is and how important it is when walking or driving to or near to school.

We were pleased to welcome Diane Mansell, Soho BID manager to our meeting. Diane explained the role of BID in the local community and the role of the ambassadors who patrol the Soho Road and surrounding areas. The ambassadors regularly patrol Grove Lane and Dawson Road at the end of the school day and will continue to do so in the hope this will further discourage illegal parking and stopping by the school entrances. Diane listened to parents express concern that many motorists fail to stop at the zebra crossing on Grove Lane. Parents felt that cameras being placed on the zebra crossing might discourage this behaviour. Diane said she would bear this in mind when they look at funding for junctions / parking / bus stops in the near future.

Operation Parksafe – a scheme that promotes reporting illegally parked vehicles. Staff and parents would be able to take a photograph of illegally parked vehicles and send it straight to the police for possible enforcement action. There will be a competion within school for the winning design of the Parksafe banners and Diane Mansell kindly offered to donate a voucher for the winning entrant.

Thank you to all the parents and carers that came to today’s meeting and your kind support.

In March the Year 5 and 6 school councillors organised a successful fundraising event for Sports Relief. They planned a range of exciting activities to not only raise money for charity but to also encourage the children to become active. The events included: a penalty shootout, an obstacle race, a hula and skipping challenge and a basketball shoot.

This term the school council have been gathering ideas about how we can improve the lunchtime, playtime and after school club provision in Grove School. Children suggested that there should be a variety of seasonal fruit available during the Summer term such as peaches and strawberries for children to choose during playtimes. The school council also came up with the idea of having background music to listen to while they ate their lunch. For afterschool clubs, the children would like to see a wider variety of activities being offered such as art club or games club. The school council are looking forward to implementing some of these wonderful ideas.

Year 3 and 4 school council wanted a clock in the playground. School now have a clock! Don’t forget school starts at 8.45am, we open the school gates from 8.30am onwards. Nursery starts at 8.30am for morning children and 12.15pm for afternoon children

We would like to welcome everyone back to a new and exciting school term. At the end of last term the School Council was extremely busy and we would like to let you know about the outcome of some of our work.

As you know, Years 5 and 6 wrote letters to Councillor Waseem Zaffar regarding our concerns about the removal of the School Patrol Crossing Warden from our school. Not only did we get a response from the councillor; he actually attended an assembly and collected the letters personally. Councillor Zaffar listened intently to our students and later met the school council for a more in depth discussion about our concerns. He informed us that he would pass our letters on to the committee that are responsible for school crossings.

In December, a visit was made to the Trussell Trust food bank by a representative group of school councillors along with Mrs Patel and Ms Din. We were warmly welcomed and the donations of food, items for personal hygiene and nappies were gratefully received. We would like to thank the children and families at Grove for supporting us in this venture. While at the Trussell Trust food bank we learnt that some supermarkets do not donate their unsold food that has past its sell by date to them. We felt extremely surprised by this action as this food would be headed to landfill sites rather than helping the needy. As a result of this information we have decided to write letters to some of these supermarkets to try and persuade them to change their minds.

Today at our School Council meeting we discussed the topic of poverty. We were extremely surprised to discover, from Mrs Patel, that there are many people who live in this state in Britain at present. We were particularly shocked to find out that some people do not have enough food to eat; some children only having a hot meal at school.
During our discussion, Mrs Patel informed us of a charity, Trussell Trust, who run over 400 food banks across the country. Our Councillors discovered that one of these food banks is on Soho Road, near to our school. As a result, we feel that we would like to support them by donating food from the pupils at Grove.
On Friday the 11th November, during assembly, the School Councillors will be informing the children about the work of the Trussell Trust and what they will need to donate.
The subjects we will be discussing during assembly will be:
. facts about poverty
. what a food bank is
. the types of food to donate and the types of food not
to donate
. how the School Councillors will organise the collection
of the food

All of our School Councillors are very excited to be supporting such a worthy cause. We will update this blog with the outcome of the assembly.

Today, we went to the zebra crossing on Grove Lane to see if it was true that cars were not stopping to allow pedestrians to cross the road.We collected three different types of evidence between 8.30am and 8.45am:

1. How many cars crossed the zebra
2. How many pedestrians used the zebra
3. How many cars that did not stop

Of the 205 cars that crossed the zebra in 15 minutes, 44 did not stop within a reasonable amount of time. So, over 21% of cars crossing the zebra are not following the rules, potentially endangering the lives of the 161 parents and children who used the zebra this morning.

We need to take action!

We are going to tell the children in upper school assembly on Friday about this dangerous situation and discuss the situation further at our school council meeting.

Today we discussed the news that the School Crossing Patrol Warden has retired and the council are not replacing him. This is because it is a priority 2 crossing, which means we have a zebra crossing, so there is no need for the zebra crossing to be manned.

Many parents have told Miss Mills at the school gates that the cars are no longer stopping for pedestrians and it can take several minutes for cars to stop.

As a school council, we were shocked to hear this news and we had a discussion about it.  It is a very busy road and the cars stopped when the warden was there. It is now unsafe for younger children and for children who go home alone.

We have decided to write to the council but first, we need to collect some evidence to support our concerns. We are going to carry out a survey on Dawson Road to find out the following:

• How busy the road is
• How long people have to wait before cars stop at the zebra
• How many people use the zebra crossing

We will keep you informed.

Today Miss Daly met with Pete Ellington, West Midlands Fire Service Road Casualty Reduction Team, who has lent us a box full of road safety resources.

Next week we are going to plan how we use these resources with year 2, 3 and 4.

At our meeting today we discussed the amount of traffic on Dawson Road.  We want to make sure that children at Grove School are safe coming to school and going home at the end of the day.

We would like to get our parents involved in supporting this. This may mean leaving the car at home and walking.

We will keep you informed of our progress.

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