This was our first proper meeting with the new head (Sam Nicholson, if you didn’t know already), and I think it’s fair to say the council have established a good rapport in quite a short space of time.

Those who managed to make it to the meeting were, Willie Campbell, Ian Rose, Andrew Montford, Michelle Telfer, Heather Hutchinson, Carole Kinghorn, Duncan Summervail and Sam Nicholson. Apologies from Heather Davidson, Anne Marie Machan, Denise Wilson and Katharine Gunn.

Housekeeping

Willie whizzed us through some of the bumf that’s come to him during the holidays - a DVD from Edinburgh about the new Curriculum for Excellence (it will be posted on the website shortly if you want to download it), and various letters from a letters from Scottish Government, LTS and from PKC.

Brainstorming

Your council members then engaged in some brainstorming, to decide what we want to do in the coming year. The ideas we came up with were:

Improving communications both to and from parents. We thought about the idea of sending out news by text message or email. We discussed a group call system and a group email system. We will collect support for these ideas from interested parents at the Meet the Teachers Night. Our communications style needs to change and improve too, so as to raise our profile with parents.

Some members were interested in resurrecting Safer Routes to School. The whole subject of children to school in one piece and carparking and so on needs to be looked at. Willie C will look at setting this in motion.

We were tasked by parents with getting more information on the curriculum for parents. This has proved tricky, with the switch to Curriculum for Excellence. Sam told us that there was an upcoming review on the way teachers were planning lessons, and that as part of the review, increased communication and curriculum information for parents would be considered.

We’ve got a healthy balance in the bank with chunks of it earmarked for improving parental involvement in the school. We’ve talked in the past about bringing speakers to the school to tell us more about curriculum developments, and with the new Curriculum for Excellence officially transitioning this year, we should be able to identify questions and subjects for discussion. Our problem in the past was “do we get someone to speak about the old curriculum or the new curriculum”.

Sam suggested we could also look at funding disclosure checks on any parents getting involved in after school clubs. Willie thought these could be had for free and he’ll check whether this is true or not. Another idea would be to finance a secretary for the FSC. This would tie in well with the need to improve our communications, however, it was felt that at this moment it was not required.

The first 12 months of the Council is now coming up, so we have a nomination process and an AGM to plan. Arrangements were set in train to have a nomination process in place before the October holidays. A new School Council would then be in place shortly after we start back, with a period of crossover to ensure continuity.

Actions

There was a lot of discussion of arrangements for the Meet the Teachers Night. FSC will have a presence, collecting emails for the new communications approach.

AM and HD to prepare election notice. AM to check constitution. A newsletter about what FSC has been doing will go out with the nominations notice for the new FSC selections.

Other

THere is going to be a survey of P6 and P7 about what clubs they want to have after school.

Next meeting

Monday 3 November 7pm. Either in the FRED room or the school.

Categories: Safer Routes to School, School Council, school