Hillcrest Primary School

About the school's work

Essential Award 16 January 2024 to 16 January 2027

Congratulations to Hilcrest Primary School on achieving the Bristol Healthy Schools Essential Award!

The school has made an exceptional effort to establish a solid Healthy Schools infrastructure by ensuring a wide representation in the Healthy Schools Steering Group (Wellbeing, Eco & School Grounds committees, members of SLT involved, pastoral worker and a parent governor).

Hillcrest Primary ensures that pupils can express their views on the school’s health and wellbeing initiatives. The school ensures the inclusion of all voices through having diverse committees, adopting the “Everyone different, everyone welcome” slogan, and having assemblies led in range of languages.

Food Environment Specialist Award: 26 January 2024 to 26 January 2027

Congratulations to Hillcrest Primary School on achieving the Food Environment Specialist Award!

The school’s submission was exceptionally strong. They demonstrated a variety of innovative ways to improve their school’s food culture and environment.

Hillcrest Primary recently introduced “Diverse Dining” to ensure that packed lunches and school meals can be eaten together. They stagger lunch times to create a calmer environment. This allows for older and younger peers to share experiences and act as role models for each other to promote healthy eating habits, kindness, table manners and develop the art of conversation. They also encourage conversations about healthy food, and classes discuss healthy snacks at break time.

A pupil’s Eco Committee has been established to monitor food waste to reduce waste over time. They also focus on offering less meat, a range of fruits and vegetables and easy to access foods that are in season.
The school invested in working with Square Food Foundation to equip all teachers with the knowledge and skills to sustain their focus on cooking and lead these sessions in the future.

The staff at Hillcrest Primary have received training around healthy fundraising. They are stepping away from “traditional” cake and sweet sales, shifting the focus from selling food and drinks to games, creating jewellery, keyring etc. for children to take home and in the past have set up a farmers market to sell crops from the schools’ allotment.

Hillcrest Primary ensures that all pupils have the opportunity to voice their opinion and are included in decision making process around school food.

The school’s senior leadership team works closely with the caterers to ensure that the menu options are high quality and offer a wide variety of foods.

Hillcrest Primary School is committed to improving its food environment despite any challenges they may face.

They do this by building a strong school community where teachers and students actively contribute and take pride in the school's ethos.

Well done Hillcrest Primary School, keep up the great work!

Mental Health and Wellbeing Specialist Award 26 February 2024 to 26 February 2027

The school invests in supporting staff mental health and wellbeing, through for example, carrying out and responding to staff surveys and focusing on methods to reduce teacher workload.

They school uses a range of opportunities to ensure that pupils stay active throughout the day, for example through taking time for sensory/movement breaks throughout the day, promoting walking to school, installing bike/scooter racks to promote active travel, and having sports coaches for games at lunchtime.

They are proud to be involved in Pupil Voice Surveys. Having both a Well-being and an Eco committee puts them in a great place to ensure that the changes being made are driven by the children.

Well done Hillcrest Primary School, keep up the great work!