We are all incredibly proud of the steps that we make towards being an active, collaborative community.

We wanted to share our success with you and inform you of the initiatives that we use across our school to enable strong relationships to be built and maintained across our community.

Tell Me Tuesday – What do we do in school? How does this affect our school community?

At Brooklands Farm School we have developed a listening project called Tell Me Tuesday. Our community’s ideas are crucial to how we run and we want to ensure every voice is heard.

Tell Me Tuesday uses vertically grouped mixed age assemblies and parent questionnaires to:

1 – 5 Scale: We ask children a series of questions linked to a weekly theme; every child has the opportunity to register their score from 1 to 5 for each question. As our scores for wellbeing and learning zones that we use daily;  1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest, most desirable score. For parents, on a Tuesday morning two members of staff are positioned on the playground with one overarching question linked to the weekly theme also requiring a 1 to 5 answer. The aim is that it will be very quick to answer and parents can even show the score using their hands as they walk by. The data from all these scores is then processed and, when we are doing well, a minimum of 85% of our community will have score us a 4 or 5 in each area.

Comments and ideas: We are so fortunate that we are able to work in small mixed-age groups for our Tell Me Tuesday assemblies. Each group is led individually by a teacher with the support of lead learners.

This provides the ideal platform for sharing ideas in a safe and respectful environment. Children feel confident to share their opinions and ideas around the current week’s theme. These ideas are then fed back to the community to let us know what the children think work well and their suggestions for improvements which we can then act upon. Parents are also encouraged to share their ideas and opinions through the two members of staff based on the playground on Tuesday mornings who will happily take note of your suggestions.

School Council: Another platform for listening to our community. Our pupils write a letter of application to be a member of the school council. All members are passionate about making our community the best that it can be. We are driven by improvements and solutions. You cannot bring an improvement to the table without a solution.

School Council members are our eyes and ears – they promote the issues that are most relevant to our pupils at the time. They are also passionate about listening to children and can be often found conducting questionnaires on the playground! They also work in partnership with other community groups, such as our PTA, most recently sourcing the views of pupils on new playground equipment.

Some of our recent successes: Development of Talking Trios across the whole school, promoting school rules, promoting tidiness and taking care of our environment, reform of corridor monitor system, informing the PTA how recently raised funds would be most beneficially spent for our pupils, finding out pupils views on our curriculum.