Sustainable Carron
Carron Primary School believes that every student's voice is essential for creating a positive and effective learning environment. Sustainable Carron outlines our dedication to fostering meaningful pupil participation and leadership, empowering every child to contribute to our school community and beyond. Our approach is built on the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC), which aim to respect the rights and promote the well-being of every child.
Guided by principles that align with key national frameworks:
- We embed the principles of Article 12, which ensures pupils have opportunities to express their opinions and have them heard on matters that affect them.
- We provide a range of age-appropriate, real-world opportunities for students to develop leadership skills and a sense of responsibility. This includes formal roles like leadership groups and informal roles like peer support initiatives.
- We ensure student participation is at the heart of our curriculum, enabling students to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, and effective contributors.
- Built on the principles of GIRFEC, we ensure every child is Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Respected, Responsible, and Included (SHANARRI). We use participation as a tool to monitor and promote pupil well-being.
Core Pillars
Our approach is built on five core pillars that underpin all student participation and leadership initiatives:
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Sustainability: We are working toward a safe, healthy, and sustainable community that protects and nurtures our environment for future generations.
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Participation: We encourage sharing the development of our community with all members and providing access to a range of resources, skills, and knowledge.
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Attainment: We aim to ensure children have the necessary skills for learning, life, and work.
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Inclusion: We ensure everyone has a role in our community and feels heard and included in decisions that affect their lives.
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Digitization: We ensure the community has the skills to access and share information that affects our current and future lives.
Sustainable Actions
The following actions are key to putting our vision into practice:
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Community: Engaging with and sharing resources, learning, wisdom, and guidance within our communities.
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Learning: Teaching skills for life and work, and fostering knowledge, skills, and attitudes that support our commitment to the environment.
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Empowerment: Building a shared belief in our ability to shape our lives and the communities we interact with.
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Action: Putting our ideas and vision into practice in accessible and sustainable ways.
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Nutrition: Ensuring awareness and understanding of nutrition and its role in our lives and our communities.
A Curriculum for Excellence
Our student leadership and participation groups provide a practical application of the four contexts for learning:
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Ethos and Life of the School: Leadership groups contribute to a positive school ethos by creating a more inclusive environment, and foster a sense of shared responsibility for the planet.
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Curriculum Areas and Subjects: Pupil leadership roles are directly linked to learning across the curriculum.
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Interdisciplinary Learning: Our action groups and committees naturally require pupils to connect knowledge from different subjects.
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Opportunities for Personal Achievement: Pupils are given structured and informal opportunities to achieve, such as gaining confidence in public speaking, developing teamwork skills, and earning a sense of accomplishment by contributing to a project.
Our Approach to Student Participation
We provide a tiered approach to student participation to ensure every child has an opportunity to be involved.
- Tier 1: Classroom and Whole-School Participation
- Tier 2: Pupil Participation Groups
Our Houses
At Carron Primary children are encouraged to support, interact and have fun with their peers and pupils across the whole school. Our four school houses are named after our local community - Glenbervie, Tryst, Stenhouse, and Kinnaird. Every pupil in our school, P1 - P7, is placed into a House when they join our school. This breaks down barriers between the year groups and creates a sense of togetherness. Our staff are all also assigned a House.
In Term 1, pupils vote within their house for their new House Captains. Each candidate completes an application form, and presents an election speech to their peers before pupils vote. The House Captains meet regularly to discuss, plan, organise and host House events. As successful earners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens, they lead, motivate and enthuse the pupils within their respective House; leading assemblies, awareness raising and fundraising events and meeting with all pupils in their house termly to discuss their achievements, upcoming events and rewards.
All pupils have the opportunity to earn House points for their House. Pupils receive House points for demonstrating attitudes, skills and our three school values: 'resilience', 'respect' and 'responsibility'. Points are earned and recorded daily throughout the school in every class. Our Prefects collect and record the total points weekly.
There are also bonus points and rewards which can be earned through termly events and inter-house competitions in which pupils from each house can participate in, ranging from sporting events to creative or STEM themed competitions and even House quizzes. We aim to recognise achievement across different areas of the curriculum so pupils can access a variety of competition that suits all. The winning house from each term earns a special House reward at the end of term, with points earned throughout the session contributing to the award of the House Cup at the end of the year.
Pupil Council
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Learning for Sustainability
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Promoting Health & Wellbeing
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Our reading culture in Carron
In 2017, we embarked on a journey to create a reading culture within our school. This is something we had huge success in, with a love of reading becoming visible in pupils across the whole school. We were even invited along to the First Ministers Reading Challenge event in May 2018 to showcase our fantastic work. Since then, we have continued to build on our reading culture, and in December 2020 we were delighted to be awarded a Reading School: Gold Accreditation. We were then re-accreditated with our Gold Reading School award in September 2024.
We are a Digital School!
At Carron Primary, we embed the use of digital technology to enhance and provide learning and teaching experiences that develop the skills and knowledge our children and young people need to be able to use the devices, platforms and services that they require for life, learning and work. In addition, our peer-to-peer Digital Leader programme empowers young people to champion the safe and positive use of technology throughout our school.
We were overjoyed to receive the Digital Schools Award in August 2023 in recognition of our digital journey.