Our pupil leaders
At St Willibrord's RC Primary School, all that we do is rooted in our mission to 'Grow In God'. We believe that Religious Education should be at the foundation of all our teaching as we help our children to come closer to Jesus Christ. We aim to reflect the Gospel message that has been shared with us in our school daily and we aim to support this with our pupils, staff, parents and community to help in the development of our faith journey.
We believe that our pupils have a key role in the leading of religion throughout our school and we encourage our pupils to take an active role in supporting, enhancing and delivering of all aspects of Religion at St Willibrord's.
We believe the best schools have a pupil lead culture where children take on key leadership roles and get their voice heard. We whole-heartedly value the work of our pupil leaders, using it to shape the teaching and learning that happens at our school. We are moulding leaders of the future, ready for work, ready for the world. We strive to craft confident and articulate leaders who can share their views to any audience and apply their leadership skills to real life situation
The aim of the various teams within the Pupil Leadership Team is to give children the chance to have leadership within the school, ensuring that their voices and opinions are heard. We are a pupil lead school, regularly receiving pupil voice to make improvements. Therefore, we are giving the children the opportunity to assist with those improvements along the journey. All Pupil leaders are ambassadors for the school they promote being a ‘steward of the earth’ and help support the school in emphasising its spirituality and Catholicity as set out in our school’s mission statement.
The Pupil leaders have the opportunity to work alongside the School’s Senior Leadership Team to help shape our school on its journey. Pupil leaders also help the governors to make decisions on behalf of the pupils. Each team has a link teacher who works closely with the pupils to develop new projects, arrange events and help the children to contribute to the voice and vision of the school. These teams are made up from children from Key Stage 2, with link children for the other Key Stages.
We believe that all children should be given the opportunity to lead an initiative or hold a position of responsibility that impacts the school, so we offer a range of senior leadership roles. For year 6 children this is part of their personal development and preparation for secondary school. All our Pupil leaders feel that they are valued in their roles and can be easily identified by other their peers. They understand the role and importance of the Leadership teams and the impact that they have had upon the school.
We have two main Pupil leadership teams, with some children advising as Senior Pupil leaders to new applicants for pupil leadership roles. The GIFT Team – Growing in faith Together and The SWAT Team- St Willibrord’s action Team.
G.I.F.T (Growing In Faith Together)
Children in Years 4, 5 and 6 are able to apply to be member of GIFT - explaining why they feel that they are able to support our school in this important role and helping to develop the prayer life of our school.
The team are selected each September and receive a blessing at our opening Mass of the year to support them in all that they do over the coming year.
The team will
- support whole school prayer and liturgy
- support class based prayer and liturgy
- support individual pupils
- lead 'stay and pray' opportunities
- look for different ways to promote prayer within our school
Children in Years 3 are able to apply to be part of 'Mini GIFT' where our older children take the opportunity to train and support them ready to potentially be full members of the pupil leadership team. Year 2 are also given the opportunity to take part as leaders within the Summer term preparing them for Key Stage 2.
As members of The GIFT Team and Mini-Gift, we have a very important job to spread the Word of God throughout our school and the school community. It is our mission to interpret scripture so that children can better understand stories from the Bible and relate them to their own lives.
The GIFT team have a very high profile in school. You may see us around school leading community prayer, leading the prayers in our own classrooms, helping deliver whole school liturgy and collective worship, welcoming visitors and new pupils to our school and organising liturgical events. Throughout the year, children in year 3 have the opportunity to work as part of Mini Gift team, where they receive training and a taster of being part of pupil leadership before they apply for positions once they are in year 4.
Our mission is to:
- work hard to promote our Catholic faith in school.
- support the school in emphasising its spirituality and Catholicity as set out in the school’s mission statement
- promote, plan and organise the celebration of liturgies and co-operate with others in developing the school as a Christian community
- preparing worship spaces around school
- responsible for class worship space
- teaching Gospel values to younger children
- ensuring the playground is an active, happy place
- help children to solve disagreements by themselves.
- work with the children on the sacramental programme
- input to school newsletter
- interview pupils to find new ideas about how to make lessons more fun and creative
- welcoming visitors to our school
S.W.A.T. (St Willibrord's Action Team)
Children are able to volunteer to be part of SWAT and this team helps to support a variety of actions in and around our school such as
- how can we support those most in need in our local and national situations?
- how can we support and develop our school?
- how can we care for our environment?
- what can we do to help to make our world a better place?
The suggestions for what we need to do and how we move forward come from the members of the team and also from our school community.
The team will be working very closely with Caritas to carefully consider how they can enhance and further develop their role within our school.
As members of the SWAT Team, we are a combination of Playground Pals, Climate Crusaders and our aim is to share our vision to make local changes that will impact our future. We will campaign and raise awareness of the issues that we face locally and nationally into the future. Through improving links between our school and the wider community, our SWAT Team puts Christ at the centre of all we do, and we are committed to always ensuring that we live our lives by putting others before ourselves.
Our mission is :
- fundraising
- ensuring the playground is an active, happy place- Playground Pals
- take care of our school environment and green space
- regular input to school newsletter
- interview pupils to find new ideas about how to make lessons more fun and creative
- raise awareness of Climate change
- encourage less waste- RRR
- take children who are injured to a first aider at lunchtime
- work together to think of new, fun activities for lunchtime
- input to the school newsletter
- help children to solve disagreements by themselves
- welcoming visitors to our school
Playground Pals
Our Playground Pals are from Year 5 and rotate across the year. Their job is to help the staff with the equipment; putting it out and tidying away and helping friends to play games safely and sensibly together. Our Playground Pals are our kind friends in school who are there to help! Any child who may not have a friend to play with can sit on the friendship bench and the Playground Pals are there to help and find a friend for them or play with them themselves.