April 6^th 2011

Session one with the Student Council involved discussing the programme with the group and going through the resources in the ‘toolkit’. This is a mature student group who were very keen to be involved in the programme and who had many ideas regarding potential improvements to the streets in the vicinity of their school. The group completed a discussion regarding what a ‘campaign’ actually is, with many of them having had previous experience as part of the school council and other groups. The majority of the group were happy to speak out and were keen to determine group rules to make sure that even though they are an expressive group that they didn’t all talk over each other all of the time. We had arranged an extended amount of time during this session as the school were not able to book lots of sessions in advance. The group were then able to access the internet and look at mapping the area around school using both aerial photographic views and street views, and could determine the regular walking routes that their peers were likely to use. The group also began to compile their blog reports for the session, and a member of IT support came to take their photograph for the blog reports. Towards the end of this session the group began to discuss the opportunities for a street treasure hunt, and it was decided that the older group members could carry this out on their own, making notes and taking photographs that they could then share with other groups in school via the website and assemblies later on.

April 12^th 2011

Session two with the same group involved making some more decisions about the way the campaign should be progressed in school. The older students fed back to the rest of the group about their findings on the street treasure hunt and decided that although there were a number of issues they would like to improve outside of the school gates, they were actually very interested in making a difference in the school grounds. The school is part of a campus that includes within its grounds a junior school and infants. The whole campus likes to be involved in projects when they can and the students felt that a campus approach would benefit this campaign. The group chose to identify litter and health as key opportunities for improvement as part of their campaign and thought it would be nice to include everyone during activity days towards the end of term. The group felt that all year groups could be involved in regular litter picks throughout the schools grounds, and that the groups that collected the most litter should be entitled to prizes as an extra encouragement. In terms of health improvements, the group felt that the whole school could benefit from a focus on walking during lunch times, and activity days. The group thought that it would be fun to have exercise classes occurring in the school grounds specifically using ‘step up’ equipment that would normally be found in a step aerobics class! They felt that this was a good way of promoting the campaign and effectively encouraging walking without having to go beyond the school boundary! The group were left to plan their activity days for the end of the summer term, promoting the activities through assemblies and posters, and articles on the website.