This year, our school government is entering its second year, continuing to give pupils a voice in shaping our school community, in line with the British values of democracy and individual liberty. Pupil representatives from the Year 5 and 6 pupil voice groups meet with Mrs. Quinn-Briton and Mrs. Anderson every half term. During these meetings, pupils share the actions they have taken over the past year and discuss the positive impact these have had on the school, such as improving school events, enhancing pupil well-being, or supporting environmental initiatives. An elected Prime Minister leads the school government, providing pupils with ongoing opportunities to engage in democratic processes and see democracy in action.
This year, the school government is also reviewing progress from last year’s action plans and setting new goals to ensure continued improvement. These meetings emphasise the rule of law, helping pupils understand the importance of fairness and structure in decision-making. Pupils are encouraged to raise concerns and offer new ideas, ensuring all voices are heard, in line with the principles of mutual respect and tolerance. Being part of the school government allows pupils to continue developing leadership and communication skills, while contributing to the growth and development of their school community.
At St. Paul's CE Primary School, our Mustard Seed group meet with Miss Jordan every two weeks.
The Mustard Seeds are responsible for:
Promoting our school vision and Christian Values across school and in the local community
Spreading happiness in the local community
Working with outside clergy to create opportunities for interactive worship across school
We are very proud to be the elected Mustard Seeds this year and have lots of brilliant ideas. We have created an action plan for the academic year, please see below:
We are so proud of our Mustard Seeds who have worked as a group together to create our Governor Prayer. This prayer is read by the Chair at the start of every meeting of the Governing Board:
Dear God,
We thank you for our school, our friends and our community. We thank you that the children in our school are so kind and are good at building friendships. We look back at all the decisions we have made and we thank you that you have helped us and guided us along the way. We pray that during our meeting you will help us to be respectful of each other’s opinions and to listen to what is being said. We ask that you would guide us in making the right decisions to help our school move forward.
Just as the mustard seed grows and the branches of the tree spread out to others, so we pray that you would help us to spread and share your love in our community. Help each of us to be filled with our Christian values of; courage, forgiveness, love and respect when discussing school matters.
In Jesus name
Amen
Updates 2024-2025
September 2024
We had an inspiring meeting where we explored the powerful role of the mustard seeds in our school community. It was a fantastic opportunity to come together, share ideas, and envision how these tiny seeds can grow into something truly meaningful throughout the year. We collaborated to craft an exciting action plan, pinpointing our key priorities to make a real difference. It’s incredible to see how our collective passion and teamwork are planting the seeds for a vibrant, impactful year ahead!
October 2024
We gathered together for a meaningful meeting to honour Remembrance Day, a time to reflect on the sacrifices made for our freedom. During our time together, we thoughtfully prepared heartfelt prayers for the upcoming Remembrance Day service at church. It was a powerful moment of remembrance and gratitude, as we came together to pay tribute and ensure that the spirit of remembrance resonates deeply in our hearts and community!
November 2024
We teamed up with Wearside Youth for Christ, working together to gather creative ideas for our upcoming Christmas Prayer Spaces. It’s exciting to see how our collaboration is shaping a festive and inspiring environment for everyone to reflect, pray, and celebrate the season of giving. It’s been a wonderful time of community, creativity, and heartfelt service!
December 2024
This season has been truly special for us! We had the joy of leading Christmas Prayer Spaces in collaboration with Wearside Youth for Christ, creating a warm and festive atmosphere for everyone to reflect and celebrate.
In addition, we spread Christmas cheer by visiting local care homes, delivering heartfelt Christmas cards, and singing joyful carols that brought smiles and holiday spirit to residents.
To keep the festive spirit going, we also made our own Christmas cards and sent them to our school governors, sharing our gratitude and good wishes. It’s been a wonderful time of giving, community, and spreading joy!
January 2025
We’ve had a fantastic time engaging with children across the school to discover their favourite Bible stories! Their ideas and insights have been inspiring, and we’re now in the exciting process of creating a special “Favourite Bible Stories” book just for all the children to enjoy. It’s wonderful to see their voices come to life in this project, making it a truly special collection that celebrates their favourite stories and lessons.
February 2025
We had an inspiring meeting to brainstorm fun and creative ways to spread happiness throughout our school! One exciting idea we came up with is making colourful positivity rocks—small, cheerful stones filled with uplifting messages and bright designs. These rocks will be placed around the school to bring smiles, encouragement, and a little bit of joy to everyone who finds them. It’s a wonderful way for us all to share kindness and brighten each other's day!
March 2025
The Mustard Seeds have been having an amazing time connecting with children across the school, chatting about their favourite Bible stories, and starting a special school-wide book to celebrate these stories! During our shared worship sessions, the Year 6 Mustard Seeds have been gathering heartfelt prayers from the children that beautifully tie into our worship themes—these prayers are truly inspiring and will be wonderful to look back on.
Some of our Mustard Seeds even had the special opportunity to help Father David lead the Mother’s Day service at church, making it a truly memorable experience.
Right now, we’re busy preparing Easter Prayer Spaces for Key Stage 2, in collaboration with the Wearside Youth for Christ team. It’s an exciting project that will help everyone reflect, pray, and celebrate the season of hope and renewal!
May 2025
The Mustard Seeds are thrilled to announce that we are still on a mission to create an incredible, school-wide book filled with our favourite Bible stories! This is our chance to share our faith, creativity, and voices in one inspiring collection. Stay tuned for something truly special!
The Mustard Seeds are spreading joy one positivity rock at a time! We’re creating uplifting messages to place around our local area and even taking them on holiday to share kindness and positivity worldwide. Let’s make the world a brighter place, one rock at a time! We might even get the whole school community to do this before the end of the academic year!
June 2025
The Mustard Seeds have been spreading sunshine by painting bright and beautiful positivity rocks, each one carefully decorated with uplifting quotes and kind messages. With love, laughter, and a splash of creativity, the children have poured their hearts into creating little tokens of joy for others to discover. These colourful rocks are going to be placed around the local area, ready to surprise and delight anyone who comes across them. It’s all part of their mission to share happiness, encourage kindness, and remind everyone that a small act of positivity can make a big difference. Keep an eye out - you might just find one and feel your day instantly brighten!
July 2025
The Mustard Seeds have been out and about in the local community, carefully placing their hand-painted positivity rocks in special hiding spots for others to find and enjoy. Each rock carries a cheerful message or uplifting quote, designed to brighten someone’s day. On the back, we’ve added our school name so that anyone who finds one can let us know where it’s travelled! We hope our rocks continue to spread smiles far and wide and if you find one, feel free to replace it with your own message of kindness and keep the positivity going!
We also had a wonderful visit from Wearside Youth for Christ, who shared the powerful story of the Good Samaritan with our children. Through drama, discussion, and hands-on activities, the children explored the importance of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness in our everyday lives. The interactive sessions helped bring the message to life, giving pupils the chance to reflect on how we treat others and how we can choose to forgive. A big thank you to the team for such an inspiring and meaningful experience!
What a brilliant year for our Mustard Seeds, well done!
2023-2024
Our Mustard Seeds team had an exciting and meaningful journey this year! We took the lead in whole-school worships, inspiring both our Early Years and KS1 children with messages of faith and hope. For Christmas, we designed heartfelt cards to spread joy to our school governors and the wider Ryhope community—bringing smiles all around! We also had the incredible privilege of meeting our SIAMS inspector, where we shared our thoughts on spirituality, our school vision, and values at St. Paul’s.
In addition, we partnered with Wearside Youth for Christ to develop and lead uplifting Easter Prayer Spaces, creating a space for reflection and connection. We also helped organise our Multifaith Week, welcoming friends of various faiths into our school community—an event we hope to make a cherished annual tradition. What a fantastic way to grow in faith, understanding, and community spirit!
Our Digital Leaders have met to discuss the importance of computing not only as an educational tool, but also as a key life skill that will support pupils in the future.
They have worked collaboratively to create a clear action plan for the year ahead, focusing on improving digital learning experiences for all pupils. As part of this, the Digital Leaders gathered feedback from their peers to understand what children enjoy about computing and what they find challenging, helping to ensure lessons and resources meet the needs of learners across the school.
Autumn Term 2 2025 The Digital Leaders carried out an audit of classroom technology, reviewing access to laptops, tablets and software. To celebrate digital learning, they have taken responsibility for showcasing achievements and inspiring others across all aspects of computing and digital technology. They have also discussed introducing eco-friendly computing initiatives, such as recycling old technology and raising awareness about energy-efficient use of devices.
In addition, the Digital Leaders have discussed how they could look to promote the responsible use of technology beyond school. They will be looking to share key messages with children and their families during the Spring term. As peer Online Safety Champions, they actively remind classmates about safe and responsible online behaviour, helping to create a positive and secure digital culture throughout the school.
2024-2025 Updates:
Throughout the year we worked hard to raise the profile of E-Safety across school. We also spent time looking at the apps available to us on our school iPads and became familiar with a wide variety of fun and engaging maths, English and art applications so that we might introduce them to and support our friends whilst on them.
Updates...
September 2024....
Our new Digital Leaders have been selected and will meet with Miss Cain in the first few weeks to develop this year's exciting action plan.
October 2024....
In October, we got together and developed this years action plan. We considered the current computing curriculum and ways we could really shine a light on computing at St Pauls.
November 2024....
In November, we planned and sent out an E-Safety questionnaire to identify where we could strengthen our computer safety across school. We considered the platforms and social media apps that children in our school may access, and created questions that would help us identify where children may need support in staying safe online.
December 2024...
In December, we collected and analysed the results of our E-Safety questionnaires. We looked at our current strengths across school and considered where further E-Safety awareness would be required. We then began to discuss what we could look to include in a school assembly to raise awareness on staying safe online.
January 2025....
We began to plan our E-Safety awareness assembly. We used the findings of our questionnaires to begin drafting a PowerPoint which we will look to use in a school assembly.
February 2025....
In February, we finalised our E-Safety PowerPoint ready to deliver our E-Safety Assembly to children across school in March.
March 2025....
The Digital Leaders have delivered a school wide assembly covering areas of online safety that children were not fully familiar with and further developed pupils' understanding of staying safe online.
Summer Term update
Throughout the summer term, our Digital Leaders have been busy discussing how computing is used across the school by both staff and pupils. They have listened carefully to feedback and used their findings to help improve our digital learning.
The group researched and selected a range of exciting educational websites and apps to support learning in spelling, maths, art, and computing. These carefully chosen tools will soon be available on school iPads and will be ready to use from the start of the new school year. Well done to our Digital Leaders for their fantastic work in helping to enhance learning through technology!
At St. Paul's CE Primary School, our Safety Squad meet with Mrs Myers every two weeks.
The Safety Squad are responsible for:
Ensuring our school is kept clean and tidy by promoting respect for our school grounds.
Ensuring all broken equipment on the yards are carefully disposed of to keep everyone safe.
Working with Mrs Myers and Mr Goodrick to ensure all communal areas are respected as this is one of our core Christian Values.
We are very proud to promote and encourage the health and safety of all the children at St Paul's. We seek to do this by demonstrating how much we love our school. We have created an action plan for the academic year, please see below
The Safety Squad held an exciting and productive meeting with our newly appointed Safety Chair of Governors, Harry. Harry is a long-standing and dedicated member of the Safety Squad and we are delighted to have him take on this important leadership role.
During the meeting, the team worked together to review and discuss this year’s Safety Action Plan, focusing on how we can continue to keep St Paul’s a safe, secure, and supportive environment for all pupils, staff, and visitors. The children shared thoughtful ideas, raised important safety points, and showed great enthusiasm for making a positive difference across the school.
The Safety Squad is excited to introduce new initiatives and continue strengthening our school’s safety culture throughout the year.
Autumn Term 2 2025
The Safety Squad rolled up their sleeves for a safety spruce-up around our school community spaces! With teamwork and enthusiasm, litter was cleared away and muddy footprints were tackled to help keep shared areas clean, safe and welcoming for everyone.
Thanks to their efforts, our community spaces are now litter-free and children can enjoy moving around the school without muddy feet causing slips or mess. A clean environment means safer playtimes, happier pupils and spaces we can all be proud of.
No litter, no muddy feet, just happy children and clean, safe spaces!
Safety Squad Updates 2024-2025:
September 2024 Our new Safety Squad has been selected! In the first few weeks, the team met with Mrs. Myers and Mr. Goodrick to kick off planning for this year’s exciting safety initiatives. Our first task was to meet with our Site Supervisor, Mr. Goodrick, to discuss health and safety across the school and identify key focus areas for the year.
October 2024 We focused on keeping outdoor play safe for everyone. We visited classes to learn more about playtime routines and new equipment, and spoke to teachers about their plans. We also talked with our peers to share important safety reminders for using the yards safely.
November 2024 This month, we turned our attention to litter on the KS1 and KS2 playgrounds. We designed a short questionnaire and asked pupils how we could keep the yards clean and tidy. After gathering feedback, we ordered new bins and helped remove broken toys to make our outdoor spaces safer and more inviting.
December 2024 We shifted focus indoors to improve safety in communal areas. The team reviewed our action plan and discussed the progress we've made so far. To help raise awareness across school, we created a PowerPoint presentation to share our goals and next steps with staff and pupils.
January 2025 We led a whole-school assembly with Mrs. Myers to highlight the importance of keeping our school clean and safe. We talked about how everyone can help by picking up litter safely and taking pride in our environment. It was a great chance to celebrate what we’ve achieved and encourage others to get involved.
February 2025 Before the half-term holidays, we carried out a litter sweep across all external areas, including bushes and hidden corners around the school yards. We wanted to make sure our school grounds were clean, safe, and ready for the new term.
March 2025 We met with Mrs. Myers to create five key questions focused on school safety. Using these, we designed and distributed pupil surveys to gather feedback from across the school. We’re now reviewing the results and will use your ideas to help shape our next actions.
March 2025 – Spring Clean Special As part of our spring efforts, the Safety Squad rolled up their sleeves to give the KS1 yard a much-needed makeover. We swept, tidied, and even found a missing football—much to the delight of Year 1! After our initial clean, we completed a full deep clean to refresh the area and make it even safer.
April 2025 We carried out a full safety inspection of all shared areas across the school, including corridors and cloakrooms. We looked for trip hazards and made sure these areas were tidy and safe for everyone. We also continued collecting responses from our Pupil Voice Mission, where pupils shared their ideas for improving school safety. Thank you to everyone who contributed!
May 2025 This month, we reviewed our Safety Squad Action Plan and reflected on all the progress we’ve made so far. We’ve now begun planning our next set of actions for Summer Term 2. With our thinking helmets on and high-vis vests at the ready, we’re excited for what’s coming next!
June/July 2025
A huge WELL DONE to our incredible Safety Squad who rolled up their sleeves and gave the school a full Spring Cleanto mark the end of the academic year!
From tidying classrooms to sprucing up shared spaces, their teamwork, dedication, and pride in our school community truly shone through.
Thank you for helping us head into the summer break feeling fresh, safe, and ready for a new year!
Updates - 2023-2024
We focused on areas across school that needed some attention by regularly clearing litter. We also created some posters to put around the entrance to our school toilets to ensure that all children were encouraged to keep them tidy throughout the school day. In additon, we visited any new Play zones as they were created on each yard so we could check on the health and safety of each area.
At St. Paul's CE Primary School, our School Council meet with Mrs Walton every two weeks.
The School Council are responsible for:
Encouraging all pupils in our school community to use their voice for the good of school
Promoting exciting opportunities and events within our own year groups and across the school as a whole
Implementing innovative ways of making our school the best that it can be by ensuring that we can all can flourish during our time here
We are very proud to be the elected as School Council this year and we have already brought many impressive ideas to our initial meetings. We have created an action plan for the academic year, please see below:
During the first autumn term, the School Council met to plan their goals and key actions for the year ahead. They began by organising a whole-school Harvest food collection, encouraging pupils, staff, and families to contribute. The response was incredibly positive, and thanks to the generosity of our school community, we gathered a wonderful selection of food items. These donations were delivered to a local food bank to help support families during the Harvest season. The School Council were proud to lead such a meaningful project and make a positive impact within the wider community.
Autumn 2 2025
In the second half of the autumn term, the School Council turned their attention to improving playtimes for everyone. They met to design bright, engaging posters to advertise a whole-school cake sale. The children carefully planned the event, considered how to promote it effectively, and worked hard to encourage participation across the school.
The cake sale was a fantastic success. With the generous support of families and the enthusiasm of pupils, the event raised an impressive £190. This money will be used to purchase new play equipment and enhance the resources available during lunchtimes. The School Council were delighted with the outcome and are excited to continue working on projects that benefit the whole school community.
2024-2025 Updates:
September 2024
Our new School Councillors have been elected by class voting systems and have met with Mrs Walton to develop this year's exciting action plan. Some of our school council also went to City Hall to meet the Mayor and some local councillors. We had a tour; visited the council chambers and learned all about democracy in our local community. We were very inspired!
October 2024
We created a video to share with the wider community requesting donations for the Harvest Festival. These were then donated to the local food bank.
November 2024
We met with Mrs Walton to discuss ways in which we could ensure the school library remains tidy and organised.
December 2024
We created posters of rules and expectations for all children when visiting the school library.
January 2025
We will share the new rules and expectations with the whole school for when visiting the library along with the new library card for signing books in and out.
February/March 2025 We held a meeting to brainstorm and identify suitable companies we could approach to request donations or support for new play equipment. As a group, we researched local businesses and made a shortlist of those we felt would be most likely to help us improve our school playground.
April 2025 We gathered again as a team to start creating a presentation aimed at informing the rest of the school about our project. The presentation was designed to explain why we want new play equipment, how it would benefit the pupils, and the steps we were taking to make it happen.
May 2025 After returning from the Easter half-term break, we worked hard to complete our presentation, adding final touches and practicing our delivery. We also met with Mrs Walton to update her on our progress. During this meeting, we reviewed our action plan and agreed on the final list of companies to contact. We then sent out our letters to local community businesses, asking for their support or donations.
June 2025 In our regular meetings, we noticed that lunchtimes in the hall were becoming quite noisy, making it difficult for some children to enjoy their meals peacefully. As a solution, we proposed playing calming background music during lunch to create a more relaxed atmosphere. We agreed to trial this idea and monitor how it impacted the noise levels.
July 2025 After several weeks of playing soft music during lunchtimes, we observed a noticeable improvement in the hall environment. Many students and staff commented that the atmosphere felt calmer and more enjoyable. We discussed the positive impact of this change and agreed that we would like to continue playing music at lunchtime in the next school year.
2023-2024...
We assisted in many school events such as Aspirations Day and overseeing the Library Logo competition which we then voted upon. Some of our School Council had the privilege to meet our SIAMS inspector to talk about the amazing things that we do at St Paul's and contributed to our fantastic judgement. We worked hard to listen to our peers and helped our school teachers and leaders in the smooth running of our school.
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