Despite all of the challenges in our first half term, we have remained strong and successfully managed to deliver many of our wonderful initiatives across the school. One of the challenges which we could have easily said we couldn’t overcome was bringing together a new Student Parliament body and holding meetings consisting of students from different year groups. However, where there’s a will, there’s a way and we successfully recruited around 50 Character Development Group Representatives to be led by our Senior Student Leadership Team as Bushey Meads School Student Parliament. Congratulations to all of our elected CDG Reps for 2020-21, shown below:

Below is what our Deputy Head Students, Dhwani Patel and Nehal Pabari had to say about their first experience of a Student Parliament Meeting:

Bushey Meads Student Parliament held our first meeting on Thursday 22nd October. Our Head Boy, Head Girl, Head Prefect, Deputy Head Girls and Character Development Group Representatives from years 7 to 13 met up from all houses to discuss issues affecting our respective year groups.

For this first half term, the main topic of debate at Student Parliament was the school experience due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each year groups’ CDG reps were asked to discuss on their tables and choose their highest priority issues which were then voiced to the whole of student parliament.

One of the key issues discussed was the newly made ‘one-way system’.  Many members of Student Parliament raised their concerns over the effectiveness of this system. In response to this, we as the senior student leadership team have spoken to Mr Varsani to see if there are any ways to create shortcuts in the one-way system whilst keeping COVID friendly.

Each table of CDG reps were given a large piece of paper to write down their ideas as, due to time, not all of the ideas would have been able to be discussed. The senior student leadership team collected in these papers and added them to a document that has been shared with all of the CDG reps to allow them to feedback to their Character Development Group. The senior student leadership team will present some of these ideas to Mr Turner to try and implement and make the school an even more COVID safe environment.

The school’s Covid safe approach was modelled, for the duration of this meeting. Mr Varsani made sure that the CDG reps sat within year group bubbles instead of sitting in houses. The tables were kept at least 2 metres apart to keep all the students attending safe.

Overall, it was very interesting to see how the COVID-19 regulations affected all things this academic year. We feel that the meeting was effective as we got to hear the opinions  of many students at the school. We hope that in the near future we will be able to mix year groups as it is nice to get to know students from different year groups in order to build a friendly community of students that is easy to approach. We are excited to speak to Mr Varsani and discuss the agenda for the next meeting and hope we can implement ideas to make Bushey Meads School an even better place than it already is..

By Deputy Head Students, Nehal Pabari and Dhwani Patel

A big thank you to all of our students that attended and contributed to our first Student Parliament – student voice is definitely having an impact!