St Peter's Church Of England Primary School

About the school's work

Essential Award 11 October 2024

Congratulations to St Peter’s CofE Primary School on achieving the Bristol Healthy Schools Essential Award!

Highlights of the school’s work:

• The school’s Pastoral Team consists of Safeguarding and Mental Health Lead, Pastoral and Family Support Worker, SEND Team. They work together with teachers and SLT to identify possible vulnerable children.
• The school’s Healthy Eating Policy has been relaunched with assemblies, activities, and competitions for pupils. The policy had been re-sent to all families, and advice/support is offered in the weekly newsletter. Family coffee mornings are being held to offer support and advise to parents and carers.
• The school demonstrated effective use of trauma informed approach in their response to bullying incidents.
• An anonymous wellbeing survey is carried out to give staff the opportunity to feedback. Drop-in sessions are also available to create space for feedback and sharing of ideas.
• The Healthy School Steering Group sessions focus on staff and pupil feedback, which helps to identify and implement the changes that are needed.
• The Pastoral Team organise collection or home delivery of food parcels for families through Fareshare. Additional food bank referrals and external agency support is offered as needed e.g., parenting classes.
• Happiness boxes are used to share gratitude and kind thoughts between staff.

The school is most proud of:

“Safer street scheme has been relaunched and the whole community has helped to support this. School has communicated regularly with PCSO, local residents, staff and families.

We have consistently received positive feedback and far less push back. We now have new barriers and additional signage. We have now timetabled staff members to be on duty along the road each day to help reinforce this.

External officers visit impromptu to fine as needed. As a result, we now rarely see cars attempting to drive along our adjoining road at times of closure and have gone from daily to termly attempts.

Where previously we had been mostly unsuccessful in stopping attempts, new practices have allowed us to stop an attempt every time.

Pupils have also become more aware of road safety while sharing discussions around this topic and can be seen to role model safer behavior when leaving/arriving to school.

The school in general feels calmer and safer at the start and end of day.”

As a result of working with the Bristol Healthy Schools Programme the school noticed:

“Healthy eating policy has been relaunched and a school wide focus of healthy eaten has been reinvigorated. All staff are supportive in helping to change pupil and parent attitudes towards healthy eating.

There has been a huge improvement in pupils’ lunches and snacks and pupils can talk confidently about the choices they are making with food e.g. discussing how much red orange or green is present on nutrition labels. When walking through the lunch hall you can often overhear pupils sharing with staff that they are proud to have chosen a healthier green option.

There have been a number of lunchtime routine changes to allow a smoother, safer lunchtime. previously year groups would need to take turn [playing on football pitches, equipment etc and there was not a lot of space for movement.

This led to limited amounts of active play for every year group. New changes to timings now mean every year group has full access to all areas of the playground and have more space to play actively. Those who would like to play football, basketball, tennis etc. have the ability to take part in this every day.

Additional staff and appointed playground leaders now mean pupils can benefit from organised activities that are adult or peer led.

Health week (a week-long event schoolwide that involves a different learning timetable that focuses on healthy activities for all pupils) now includes focusses on wellbeing and healthy eating in addition to previous focusses on active/sports activities.

This gives a more holistic approach to reinforcing healthy practices in our pupils.

We have increased the number of places available for bikeability to allow more pupils to access this learning and encourage more pupils to safely and actively travel to school.”

Well done St Peter’s CofE Primary School, keep up the good work!