Pupil Leadership

We wholeheartedly believe in creating a pupil leadership culture where children take on key leadership roles and get their voice heard. We want our children to be actively involved in school improvement and to breathe life, relevance, purpose and meaning in all that happens at our school.

We strive for as many opportunities for children to become confident and articulate leaders who can share their views to any audience and apply their leadership skills to real life situations within our community and beyond. We believe in giving the children the opportunity to make a vital contribution to continually improving their school and their learning journey.

The aim of the various pupil leadership roles is to enable children to take on leadership responsibilities within the school, ensuring their voices and opinions are heard and acted upon. We actively encourage children to challenge, discuss and debate issues which are important to them. We believe that by giving ownership of the school to our children it creates a better school and builds leaders of the future.

These are our current pupil leadership groups with an overview of their roles and their aims for the year.

School Council

The Morningside school council have the important job of seeking the views of all pupils and sharing them with the adults in school. They make sure that everyone’s voice is heard. They hold a class council meeting, every fortnight, where they feed back from the previous school council and then ask for feedback and areas for discussion. The individuals in each class can add to this agenda and the councillors make sure that everyone has a turn. During the intervening weeks, the school council meet with Jo to discuss the ideas and input from their class. There are two councillors and two deputies in each class. They are voted in at the beginning of the year and have training on how to be a councillor before they are awarded their badges. This year we are working on the following campaigns:

raising money for our chosen charities, Shelter and St Joseph’s Hospice
asking Hackney Council to reinstate the traffic camera on our ‘school street’ to improve safety before and after school
reducing littering in school and our local area

Wellbeing Ambassadors

The Wellbeing Ambassadors work with school leaders and the schools WAMHS clinician Magdalena to promote wellbeing for all pupils. The children have all received training in how to talk to their peers who may ask for help as well as when to talk to an adult. The children also work alongside the school’s playground leaders to ensure that the playtime offer promotes wellbeing for all children, including options for those who prefer lots of different play. This academic year we are developing:

a Morningside play charter and ensuring our play offer continues to be fantastic for all children. This includes developing quieter spaces and areas inside for children to access.
promoting and prioritising wellbeing for all children – reminding everyone of our mindfulness and breathing techniques and encouraging people to talk.
helping and designing activities for key dates such as children’s mental health week
sharing information about wellbeing with our school and local community

Sustainability Squad

The Sustainability Squad is a group focused on reducing the school’s environmental impact. They have undertaken a ‘green’ audit of the school to discover which areas of school life we could improve in order to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce global warming. They interviewed different members of staff such as our site manager and school cook to find out about issues such as water use and food waste. Their key finding was that the school could reduce its electricity use and plastic waste. The Squad will be running awareness events and assemblies to promote their key messages. They also decided that we could easily increase the amount that we recycle and reuse. From their findings they decided to run the following campaigns this year:

‘Switch Off’ – to encourage everyone to switch off lights and computers.
Eco Swap events – to promote the reuse of items that might otherwise be thrown away
In The Know- to reduce the amount of plastic waster
Increasing biodiversity in the school grounds

Digital Leaders

The digital leaders’ role is to promote the responsible and safe use of technology in our school and local community. They work alongside school leaders to ensure that all children know who to talk to if they need support online and how to make sure they are promoting healthy limits on screen time and using the internet for positive purposes. The digital leaders have all received training in how to support the use of computing equipment in school and can even help fix some of the most common problems in class. This year we are working on:

being someone for our peers to talk to if they are having problems online (children are trained to report these to an adult).
talking to our peers about screen time and the importance of a good balance of time away from the screen.
supporting school leaders to review the computing curriculum and collect pupil voice from our peers.
helping and designing activities for safer internet day
creating a lunchtime club for younger children who would like to develop their digital skills

Junior Road Safety Officers

The Morningside JRSO (Junior Road Safety Officers) team deliver road safety as well as active travel messages to the Morningside school and the local community.

The Junior Road Safety Officers (JRSOs) are responsible for:

promoting road safety within Morningside
attending Hackney road safety events
giving road safety messages in assembly
supporting healthy travel to school

Reading Champions

The Reading Champions at Morningside are four pupil leaders, in Upper Key Stage Two, who aim to raise the profile of reading within the school. Working alongside a group of other Hackney schools, the Reading Champions are able to listen to and share ideas about how to best fulfil their roles and meet targets.

Through a range of networking events and interactive meetings, there is a great opportunity to recommend and share texts, to discuss different incentives to promote the love of reading across each setting and to create a culture of excitement around different types of literature. A number of challenges (and awards) are set out by Hackney Education and Hackney Libraries for the Reading Champions to complete. These challenges are a range in size and require a range of different skills to be utilised.