Here are our fabulous School Council 2022-23!
We have two representatives from each class Year 1-6 and we meet a couple of times each half term. The School Council are a really important part of our school community as they share their views about aspects of school life and help with lots of projects! Watch this space for more developments! There was a lovely turnout of parents for an event to launch our Making it REAL project in the Nursery. This project aims to raise early literacy levels by encouraging families to do simple low cost activities at home like mark making, reading, talking and looking at everyday objects around them.
Every conversation with your child matters - whether on the bus or in the bath - so seize every opportunity! Our Year 6 class developed their understanding of communities and their role as citizens both locally, nationally and globally. The event was held at Lee Fire Station and the children explored themes including transport, fire safety, the role of the police, road safety and healthy lifestyles.
Congratulations to all of our parents, governors and volunteers who joined us for a fantastic training session. The focus of the training was supporting young children to make progress with their Reading. We are very grateful that our Reading Champions have all committed to volunteering at St Mary’s to regularly listen to children read. We would love for more of our parents to become Reading Champions - please ask your child’s teacher if you are interested or speak to the school office.
We were honoured to be chosen to host our local Assembly meeting, attended by all three of our local councillors and many local residents. It provided an opportunity to share local updates, focusing on housing, transport and community events.
We were pleased to welcome back 'Engage' to lead a well-attended workshop focusing on Secondary Transitions. As well as offering some valuable practical advice, it was also an opportunity for parents to share their feelings at a time of change for their children.
St. Mary's is part of a Lewisham pilot scheme to raise the awareness of racial inequality in schools. We also wanted to look at how this affects our families in housing and health.
We began the process by having a "house meeting" in school with parents. This involves everyone taking a turn to speak for 1 minute and allows everyone to have their say. Two questions were presented;
From the discussions it was clear that there are lots of areas where our children face race inequality - from the variation of reading books offered to the motifs found on glasses in Specsavers for children! Health inequality also appeared to concern our parents. This is just the start of many conversations we need to have with our community in school to fully understand the issues and we need more parents to take part so do come along next time! At St. Mary's we are very proud of our courageous advocacy campaigns with Lewisham Citizens which both parents and children have been part of.
The first win came in March 2022 following an extensive campaign by lots of schools and charities to allow Free School Meals for all families who have no recourse to public funds. A former pupil at this school and his mum attended an MPs briefing at Westminster with Mrs Tildesley to share their experiences and this was the catalyst to the announcement made by the government to allow all pupils FSM regardless of their parents' immigration status. The second win came in June 2022 - a concession from the government so that not all young children have to pay £1012 to become a British Citizen. Our children have been campaigning for the abolition of the fee for a number of years and even went to the Home Office some years ago to draw attention to this. You can read about the campaign below which includes a quote from one of our parents... https://www.citizensuk.org/about-us/news/news/citizens-uk-and-coram-childrens-legal-centre-celebrate-home-office-waiving-citizenship-fees-for-some-children/?fs=e&s=cl We are proud to be a Sanctuary School and we will continue to campaign for the right of everyone to be welcomed and treated with respect and dignity. Some of our parents and children went to Laurence House to meet up with the re-elected Mayor to remind him of the promises that he made around housing issues when he came to our school for the Lewisham Citizens Accountability Assembly in April.
Damien Egan promised that if he was re-elected he would work with us to improve conditions, care and communications for Lewisham residents. Together with representatives from lots of other organisations in Lewisham we congratulated the Mayor on his re-election by giving him some bunting to hang in his office. We also invited him to play a wordsearch game - some of the children from St Mary's helped him to find the words:
ENGAGE provided our parents with a lovely breakfast and a really useful workshop on wellbeing.
We learnt about the 5 ways of keeping well which include staying active, connecting with people and learning something new. Combine that with the 5 A's - affection, appreciation, acceptance, approval and attention and we have a recipe for wellbeing. What will you do to stay active or to learn something new? Have you thought about volunteering or giving your a bit of your time to help others? Importantly if we model looking after ourselves well our children will learn great skills for life too! ENGAGE is an organisation run by parents for parents in Lewisham and they will be returning for further workshops in the new academic year on Resilience and Choosing a Secondary School. |
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April 2024
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