School Council, Eco Council & Junior Travel Ambassadors

The School Council

The Eco Council 

At Stonehill School, we have an Eco Council. The Eco Council is a group of children who plan and undertake activities to improve the environmental performance of the school.

The current eco councillors are:

Year 1 - Taylor,

Year 2 - Reggie,

Year 3- Leo,

Year 4JW - Alyssa,

Year 4P - Alethea,

Year 5 - Jack,

Year 6- Jack.

The eco-councillors are currently working hard to apply for the Green Flag award.

They have raised £80.00 this term as part of the Bags 2 School initiative.

Junior Travel Ambassadors

The 4 newly appointed Junior Travel Ambassadors (JTA) from Year 5 have been equipped  with shiny JTA badges, and they have bundles of enthusiasm, to inspire everyone to think about road safety and transport!

Mrs Whittemore met with the class in September to explain what the role involves and to share the job description outlining what is expected from all of our JTA's. Everyone had the opportunity to completed an application form for the role noting their interests, strengths and why they feel that they would be a suitable candidate.

Mrs Whittemore read all the applications with the retiring JTA's in Year 6 to make their selection. Four new JTA’s from Year 5 were selected who will represent the whole school.

The JTA’s job can entail carrying out assemblies, conducting surveys, classroom talks, helping with completing the school travel plan, uploading evidence to our Modeshift Stars portal, learning how to use a Journey Planner and running competitions on a regular basis throughout our term in office. The term in office is from September to July, following an academic year.

The Junior Travel Ambassador scheme is run by Hertfordshire County Council. We work in partnership with Hertfordshire’s Road Safety Officer, Chi Ming Lai. Mr Lai met with the newly appointed team to discuss projects that they could begin working on. 

The JTA’s meet every 3 weeks with Mrs Whittemore to share ideas and opinions. During each meeting we discuss our progress with current projects. We also plan future projects, organise prizes for competitions, and select the winners of existing competitions!

The role of a JTA is to encourage a greener approach to transport. We like to see our friends and fellow pupils walking to school wherever possible. We check the Living Streets travel to school data, a hand out badges every month to those pupils who have walked at least twice a week for that month. Walking to and from school is important, but we also want pupils of Stonehill School to be safe on the roads of Letchworth. We work with our school to create a safer environment. We also have a lot of fun running competitions to encourage a safe and sensible attitude to the roads of Letchworth.

Our Successes

Since the Junior Travel Ambassador Scheme started in November  2016, we have:

• Launched a Walk to School competition
• Raised awareness of road safety at our school
• Worked with Living Streets and Letchworth Council to improve safety on the roads outside our school
• Introduced our parking pledge “Don’t be road monster” to encourage safe parking in and around the school
• Informed everyone about our plans in whole school assemblies
• Arranged several Clean Air day by dressing in green to raise awareness
• Run a “Bling your bike /scooter” competition to launch the unveiling of our new scooter pods in the main school and the Early Years Unit

       We held a competition after our ​Day-Glo day in school with some super prizes for raising awareness of safety during dark mornings which we hoped helped us achieve the Silver Modeshift Stars.

Future Projects

We have lots of projects happening at the moment, and planned for the future. These include:

• Organising Scooter Safety workshops for Year 2 in the autumn of 2019
• Organising Pedestrian Skills understanding for Year 3 in June 2020
• Organising a road safety workshop for the Early Years children in October 2019
• Receiving the Gold Modeshift star award in February 2020.