Pupil Voice at Harefield

Harefield Primary School is a Silver accredited Rights Respecting School. Every year pupils from Y1-Y6 apply to be part of our Pupil Voice group. Pupils running for election put together a manifesto and present it to their class in the hope that they are elected by their peers. Each class elects a Pupil Voice Representative.

Once elected pupils attend regular Pupil Voice meetings with our Rights Respecting School Leader, Mrs Heal. In these meetings pupils represent the voice of their classmates and make decisions about things that affect them and share ideas about how we can collectively make Harefield life even better. We learn about Children’s rights through these meetings, assemblies and children’s rights are integral to our school ethos and community work. We create class charters which incorporate children’s rights which each class sign at the start of each academic year.

In February 2021 Harefield obtained our Bronze RRS award and since then we had been
working towards our Silver award. Last November 2022 we achieved our Silver RRS award. We had an accreditation which included a group of children talking about how our school promotes children’s rights. They talked to an outside assessor about our work in Pupil Voice as well as other school projects that we have been taking part in over the past couple of years. These have included making playground charters, deciding on new playground equipment, raising money for the people of the Ukraine and for orphaned children in Uganda with our “Smarties Challenge”. We were extremely proud of our children – they spoke clearly, confidently and passionately about children’s rights.

We are now going to be creating an action plan in order to gain our gold award. This will include looking at our curriculum and empowering our children to try and make local and global changes. 

Keep looking at our blog for more news and updates of our Rights Respecting journey to
Gold!

The Southampton Daily Echo picked up on our achievement and wrote this article:

https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/23448735.unicef-recognised-harefield-primary-school-pupils/