Please can we say a very big welcome to our School Council page.  We have councillors from year 1 to year 6 and we meet every half term.  Please look at our photographs and minutes of our meetings.

Thank you,

Emily, Zach and Abbie

Lead councillors

Rachel Reeves’ visit on 19th September 2024.

Below is a transcript of our meeting with Rachel (who is our local Labour MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer)

Murphy
Welcome: Rachel, we would like to warmly welcome you to our school, Bramley St. Peter’s.  We hope you enjoy your visit. We are going to tell you about some of the things our School Council have been doing and we are also going to ask you some questions about your job as an MP and as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
Evie
Our petition
•    We presented a petition of 555 signatures to our local Councillors Tom Hinchcliffe, Kevin Ritchie and Adele Rae.  Our petition was to respectfully ask for a zebra crossing outside of school, as our Lollipop Person Pam had retired and because of budget cuts, Leeds City Council would not replace her. The petition was signed from the very youngest child to our oldest grandparent or carer.
Sebastian
•    We have had an email from Councillor Ritchie to say that the Council are willing to re-instate the Lollipop person until a decision is made about getting our zebra crossing. The email said that our petition ‘provided extra scoring’ towards getting our zebra crossing.
Brooke
•    We believe that, in the words of one of our children, ‘A CHILD’S LIFE IS PRICELESS’.
Ruby
Brightening Bramley
•    We have continued in our mission to Brighten Bramley. This started after COVID by our councillors asking all children in Bramley to paint or draw a rainbow to put up in their bedroom window.  All of our children drew a rainbow and we sent a message to every school to ask them to do the same.
Jacob
•    Working with Bramley Care Bears we have made flower beds which are outside school for our school community and the local community to enjoy. Bramley Care Bears, their volunteers and some children worked at weekends for many weeks to make the raised beds. Local teenagers also helped.
Luna
•    Bramley Care Bears also built us a shelter so that Santa has somewhere warm to sit when he visits us every Christmas. It looked lovely last year with all of our decorations in our forest garden. 
Thomas
Supporting new children 
•    We have created a child friendly booklet which we give out to all of the children who are new to our school. It was written and illustrated by the School Council and the children we have given it to say it has lots of information and it made them feel welcome. 
Frankie
Past campaign
•    We like our petitions and our last campaign was to have the seats put back at the shopping centre. We were very proud to have been part of that campaign.

Our questions for you
Jacob
•    Why do you think that you are the best person for the job?

Murphy
•    What is it like being in Government?

Ruby
•    How much money do you get to distribute to the country?

Evie
•    How many other world leaders do you get to meet?
Frankie
•    How much money is spent on the military?

Luna
•    How do you balance the books?

Brooke
Our key question 
How much money are you giving to children’ education because we have lots of challenges – the money our school is given is less than it should be. We know that some of the reasons are because there are not as many children, but the last Government did not increase the funding as they should have done. 
This means that lots of schools have a deficit like ours does and we have to make plans on how to reduce our spending.  But what do we have to get rid of? Play resources at lunchtime?  School trips?
Thomas
We have to have a standard to keep us safe, like a safe building which is warm and well stocked, with enough staff, so that we can learn well. If we don’t have a safe building or enough staff, then school would become unsafe.

Sebastian
How do you intend to help schools financially?  This is our question to you – how can you now help us to have enough money to cover heating, have a safe building and have enough staff so that we can learn effectively?  

Ruby
Thank you Rachel for coming to visit us today and we hope you have enjoyed meeting our School Council. Please could we take a photograph with you for our website?
 

OUR BOOKLET FOR NEW CHILDREN 

We have been busy producing a booklet which we give to children who are new to our school. We produced it so that new children feel welcomed at our school and to answer any questions they might have. 

In our meeting in October we had 4 items on our agenda.

1)  We voted for and chose our Lead Councillors (Emily, Abbie and Zach).

2)  We planned our planting day with the local Councillors Tom, Adele and Kevin.

3)  We planned our vote.

4)  We started to plan our Parliament Week Collective Worship.

We voted on which activity we would like to present to the Councillors and to other schools, as the most popular activity as voted for by our children, at our visit to the Inner West Youth Summit in November.  This followed the introduction to democracy and voting at our recent Collective Worship presentation.

The results of the ballot were:

Sports and health - 89 votes

Arts and crafts - 78 votes

Music and performing - 38 votes. 

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SCHOOL COUNCIL 2023-2024

Please can we introduce you to our School Councillors for 2023-2024.

They are led by our Leadership Team of Azania, Bane and Jaxon. 

Inner West Summit 2023

4 of our children went to the Civic Hall to meet our local Councillors, the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, and representatives from other local primary and high schools.  They also got to vote on how to spend £50,000 on activities for children and young people in our area!

Our Co-Chair of Governors Julie Falkiner also came with us. We all had a great day.

Please see below some pictures from the day.   

School Council 2023-2024

Our first School Council meeting was held this week and we wrote down why our Council is so important.  We talked about our priorities for this year and decided we will be continuing with our Brightening Bramley campaign, including making birdboxes.  We love to have new children in our school and we would like to design a leaflet to welcome them.

We aim to:

• make Bramley St. Peter's and Bramley a better place to live in and to learn in
• look after each other and new children
• make changes for the better
• make good decisions for school and for the community
• be super role models.

From: Stanley Y2, Archie Y6, Jaxon Y6, Jacob Y4, Murphy Y5, Sebastian Y5, Bane Y6, Luna Y4, Maci Y2, Matthew Y3, Emelia Y3, Ruby Y5, Oliver Y3, Megan Y6, Brooke Y4, Olivia Y3, Azania Y6, Frankie Y4, Jacob Y2, Sam Y6, Harrison Y3.

School Council 2022-2023

Our School Council elections for 2022-2023 were carried out in class. Children voted for two representatives from their class to represent them as school councillors for the year.

At our first School Council meeting of 2022-2023 we decided that we would like to lead a campaign which we propose to disseminate to all schools in Bramley.  We have called our campaign 'Brightening Bramley' so we can share some happiness around our whole community. We decided to create a questionnaire which we could share with our own class to think of some no cost and low cost ideas to 'brighten Bramley'. We could then choose the most popular idea by having a vote. 

At our next meeting we decided to change the name of the leader of the Council to 'Head Councillor' and we asked for nominations for this post.  We had to write down then present our reasons why we should lead the Council and we then had a vote. Sam and Evelyn were then chosen as Head Councillors as they had the most votes. Becky and Mason were made secretaries of the Council and they will take the minutes of the meetings.  They are responsible for uploading our agenda and minutes on to the website. 

Brightening Bramley - our ideas

All of the classes submitted their ideas.  They included:

• painting rainbows all around school
• hiding smiley faces around Bramley for people to find
• litter picking
• toys and book swaps
• planting flowers and trees and taking care of them
• painting rainbows on windows (like we did in lockdown)
• decorating Bramley with ribbons
• more benches
• solar panel lights to put on the fence
• saying hello to everyone
• helping the elderly
• creating a 'character' for Bramley 
• being happy and cheerful
• raising money for charity
• legal graffiti
• repairing damage around Bramley
• giving out home made decorations
• having a half day on a Friday for everyone
• putting out more bins to collect rubbish
• lower food prices to help the homeless
• food and water stations for dogs
• more places being child friendly
• inspirational quotes around the town
• brighten the church buildings 
• ban e-scooters on the park
• ban on smoking in public places
• decorate shops and shutters

Two themes stood out during our discussion and from the questionnaire.  They were - having pictures of rainbows in every house in Bramley where there are children and also planting flowers around Bramley. We decided that we would create a sheet which would go home which would have on one side a message from the Council explaining our campaign, then an outline of a rainbow on the other side to colour in and put in our window. 

We thought we we would like to make pictures of rainbows to put up on the fence outside school.

We gave some suggestions for how we could get the message to other schools and they included putting a message on Twitter and our Facebook page, emailing the schools, writing letters to the schools, and Sam and Evelyn visiting the schools. We will discuss these suggestions with Mrs Esplin and Mrs Finn. 

We decided that we would like to see if our local councillors and MP could help us in our campaign and so we emailed them. Here are their replies:

From Councillor Gruen - 

Dear Sam and Evelyn,

Thank you for your e mail. We always encourage children and young people to get in touch with us and tell us what they are doing in case there is a way we can help. Your idea of Brighter Bramley is really great, especially after all the difficult times of the pandemic.

I like the planting idea too. 

Yes, we have got some money that could be used for the things you need to do the planting, but because schools already have a budget of their own, we are not allowed to give the money to the school. It is usually used to give to charities or volunteers, who don’t have any money.

However, if Mrs Lambert could help you to think of an organisation that is representative of the school, but doesn’t have a budget, such as a Parent Teacher Association for example, or a sports or arts club, we could probably find a way of giving some money to that so you could buy the things you need.

I am sure as head councillors you will be able to work with the school council to solve this problem.

We look forward to hearing back from you, good luck with the campaign, and of course we would love to come and visit you in school to see how it is going.

Very best wishes from all of us,

Caroline (Gruen)

From Councillor Ritchie - 

Dear Sam & Evelyn

This sounds like a wonderful project and would be delighted to support as well.

The School Council at St Peter’s have great track record of succeeding, following your important contribution to the Shopping Centre Seats campaign, which led to their successful return. Thank you for all you did as a school. 😊

I look forward to hearing more about this latest exciting project.

Best wishes

Kevin Ritchie

And finally, from Rachel Reeves:

Dear Sam and Evelyn, 

Thank you for your email, and it is wonderful to hear about your campaign to Brighten Bramley!

I have always been impressed by the commitment of your School Council to try to improve the local area, and to think of ideas that will benefit our community. 

Please do keep me updated on your campaign, and I will support you in any way I can. 

If you would like me to put a post on my Facebook page, Rachel Reeves - MP for Leeds West, to make more people aware of the project, I would be very happy to do so. 

With very best wishes,

Rachel Reeves

Member of Parliament for Leeds West

Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer

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