Pupil Parliament
Article 12: Your right to be be heard!
Article 29: Your right to be the best you can be!
2022/23
Our Pupil Parliament work this year is focusing on Health and Wellbeing.
In April 23, we visited Ashbury Meadow to learn all about mental health. Our school survey showed that children had a basic understanding of what Mental Health is, but weren't sure about many things they could do to look after it. We are going to create a Mental Health Toolkit to share with other schools in Manchester about how to look after their Mental Health. We had guest speakers from the Healthy Schools Team and the NHS to help really develop our understanding of triggers for poor mental health and how to deal with big and small feelings.
In December, children went on their first visit to MEA. We used the Outright UNICEF recourses to support our learning about what health care is and what we are all entitled to. We learned about the health care that children in different countries have access to, compared to us. After this we created a survey to ask the children in our schools what they knew about mental health.
2021/2022
In July 22, we attended the first Manchester Children's Safeguarding Conference. We presented alongside Beaver Road and St Mary's and shared the feedback from Manchester Pupil Parliament. We told councellors that some of the main things that impacted on our safety were: traffic when coming to school, air pollution and gangs in the local area.
Here is our performance at the conference!
We are very excited to get our Pupil Parliament work underway again now that government restrictions allow. In Autumn 2 we started our new project with the Pupil Parliament. This year we are working with Manchester City Council on their 'Our Year' initiative. This is to get the voice of children across the city heard. Click on the picture below to find out more.
Our first session was at St Mary's Primary school in Moss Side. We learned about how famous activists around the world got their voices heard through protest, art, poems and other medium. Our school learned all about Banksy and how he uses street art to get his message out about causes he cares about (such as war and homelessness). We also found out about other famous activists including Greta Thumberg, Colin Kaepernick (first NFL player to take the knee), Len Johnson (a boxer from Manchester who was the first non-white person to win a major title), Lem Sesay (black British writer), Emmeliene Pankhurst (Mancunian suffragette who fought for women's rights) and David Attenburgh.
Watch the video below to get an idea of what we did on the Day.
We also had a special message from Lamin Touray. He is a local activist from Moss Side who supports the Black Lives Matter movement and is campaigning to have a statue of Len Johnson erected in Manchester to celebrate what he did for Black people in Britain.
Our work over the year culmanated in some children from our school, along with St Mary's and Beaver Road, presenting at the first ever Manchester Children's Safeguarding Conference. We fedback on the views of the children in the Pupil Parliament about what makes them unsafe in Manchester. The main themes that we talked about were air pollution, gangs of youths in the community and parking issues outside of the school.
You can find some more information about the Children's safeguarding conference here.
2018/2019 (Pre-pandemic)
Campaigning
In January 2019, we launched our first Pupil Parliament event. Our year 5 pupils, along with year 5 pupils from 14 other primary schools in Greater Manchester, attended MEA to discuss and debate the Global Goals we thought were most important. We were joined by Councillor Luthfur Rahem and our MP Mike Kane who told the children all about Parliament and campaigning. Our top 5 were:
* Zero Poverty
* Gender Equality
* Good Health and Well Being
* Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
* Climate Action
Our Pupil Parliamentarian's brought these choices back to school and led a whole school vote on the most important one for us. Our winner was ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’. We creating a campaign, writing campaign speeches and making banners, to share this information with members of the public in Manchester.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!! Check out our article the Manchester Evening News by clicking the picture below...
Watch the video below for more information!
Visit to the Houses of Parliament
The Pupil Parliamentarians visited London to look around the Houses of Parliament and learn about politics and decision making in our country. We met our MP, Mike Kane, and took part in a workshop all how parliament and law making has changed throughout the years.
Visit to the Council Chambers
The children spent the day at the council chambers in Manchester and listened to some inspirational people, including Councillor Eve Holt and James Plant, the leader of Manchester's Youth Parliament. The children wrote their campaign speeches and read them aloud to the other schools. This was a truly inspirational day for the children!