The Junior Leadership Team's role is to act as link between the children in their class, the Junior Leadership Team, the Senior Leadership Team, and the Governors of Rockliffe Manor Primary School. As members of the Junior Leadership Team, they have a special role in making sure that the children in our school have a voice and opportunities to evaluate and develop Rockliffe Manor, so that it continues to grow. Each member of the Junior Leadership Team is elected through a democratic process, providing children with individual liberty to empower choices around their education.

What is a Junior Leadership Team?

A Junior Leadership Team is group of students who are elected to represent the views of all pupils and work together to improve their school.  We follow a democratic process to elect the leaders.  If they wish to become a junior leader, the pupils must present a short speech to the class expressing why they feel they should be a member of the team. Their class then decide and a secret vote takes place.

Who are the Junior Leadership Team?

The Junior Leadership Team has two representatives from each class ranging from Year 1 to Year 6.

What do the Junior Leadership Team do?

The Junior Leadership Team meet regularly to discuss issues that are important to them. At the start of the academic year the team met and created a ‘School Development Plan’ that set their three main aims for the year. These are:

• To enhance and better playtimes for the children at Rockliffe Manor
• To make Rockliffe Manor an ecofriendlier school
• To have children’s ideas included in their learning.

At Rockliffe Manor we believe in our children being change makers. With recent events and more widespread attention on the climate action that is happening around the world. Our Junior Leadership team decided as one of their actions to form an Eco-Team. From this, enthusiastic and determined children at Rockliffe Manor have come together to form our Eco-Team. Their vision is to help make Rocklike Manor more sustainable and eco-friendly, not just for the school but for the local environment in general.

The Eco-Team have created targets they hope to achieve prior to the end of the academic year. Their main aim is to become a Green Flag Eco School, which would represent the level of change they have been able to make on the school and the community. In order to achieve this goal, their targets are:

• Reducing electricity consumption  
• Ensuring that recycling, reducing and reusing is a priority 
• Making Rockliffe Manor a healthy school

The Eco-Team will be working alongside teachers and their peers to ensure that Rockliffe Manor is addressing environmental issues in their day to day lives. They will make their presence known around school through assemblies and other events throughout the year.

At Rockliffe Manor, we believe in ensuring global themes such as sustainable development are at the forefront of the children’s education, guaranteeing that children develop their critical thinking skills and their voice to speak against important issues that are directly affecting them.

To fulfil one of the Junior Leadership Team’s target of enhancing and bettering playtimes for the children at Rockliffe Manor, it was decided to create a team of supportive, enthusiastic, and responsible children to be Playleaders. The Playleaders take a key responsibility around the playground at lunchtime supporting our midday meal supervisors.

During lunchtime the two Playleaders on duty are in charge of running suitable games for groups of children, acting as mediators during playground issues and being a safe space, whom other children can talk to.

The Playleaders had to complete an application form where they stated why they thought they would be suitable for this role. From these applications Playleaders were then chosen and received a training session on what their role would entail. Playleaders consist of children from Year 3 to Year 6 and they work on a rota-based system each week.

In collaboration with our partner school Foxfield and Woodhill, some of our Rockliffe Manor children recently took part in an amazing training session to become Mental Health Champions where they learnt useful strategies that will benefit all pupils.

"We learnt different strategies to help us in being able to control our emotions - not all of them will work for everyone but a few will. One of the strategies was thinking of or doing something that you enjoy. I took away that sometimes asking someone continuously if they are okay can actually have the opposite effect and also it can be hard to guess how someone is feeling as people can hide their emotions for different reasons.  Now, we can work with children of any age to help them to manage their emotions and give them the strategies we learnt."  Lex

"I enjoyed making calm jars and one of my ideas for making an impact at Rockliffe is to make these for all year groups. Some strategies to help mental health are playing outside and talking to family and friends. We learnt about how fast emotions can spread and did an activity about how anger and happiness can spread on the playground. I think we need to support the younger children because they get upset more and don’t understand as much." River

"I liked working with the children from Foxfield and we got together very easily as we are all alike. We loved making calm jars with water and glitter and already have these in our reflection areas at school. We played a game around spreading negative and positive emotions. I think we should now form a mental health leader team and coach children at Rockliffe Manor."Olivia