Larger Cups, More Clocks and a Bid for Ostriches

I read the St Chris newsletters at bedtime now. My husband has asked me to stop reading out the good bits.

The good bits are many. In October the pupils’ own newsletter reported the tap by the History Block fixed, benches being pursued with the Parents’ Circle, and gym access for older years still waiting on staffing and inductions. A government that tells you what is still waiting, and why. In November the school reported that the grounds team had bought new electric tools, a backpack blower among them, because the School Council had asked for quieter, more environmentally friendly equipment. When I asked our council for quiet, they sent a leaflet about bins.

The training starts young. The junior council, about ten pupils from Reception to Year 6, learns to manage a budget and to take on other people’s views “without asking leading questions”. The school’s democracy is over 100 years old. Ours is three weeks old, and I have been asking leading questions since 2011.

Our family council meets on Sundays at the kitchen table, with a whiteboard. I opened the first session with “Don’t we all agree screen time has crept up?” and was ruled out of order by our daughter, nine, for leading. Motions passed: a bigger cereal bowl, a clock in the bathroom, and pudding on Wednesdays. Motions failed: mine, all of them, including one to stop having motions.

Then the head’s message in that January newsletter described a week of conversations with students that ended in requests: a darts board, or possibly a darts arena, a debate on geopolitics, and “a suggestion that we acquire some ostriches for Arunwood, purely for training purposes”. Our daughter read it over my shoulder.

On Sunday the family council passed, by three votes to two, a motion for three chickens, purely for training purposes. I tried asking whether chickens wouldn’t be an awful lot of work, and was ruled out of order.