Helping children develop good manners, conduct and behaviour starts in infancy. These skills are just as important as academic, sporting and other achievements. Well-developed social skills enable us to interact and communicate positively with the people around us, and enable us to form positive and appropriate relationships. The experiences and habits that children develop will stay with them throughout their whole life and will support them in being happy, well balanced and confident adults.

At St Mary’s we use a range of incentives and rewards to help children develop these very important positive behaviours and attitudes.  These are summarised below and can also be found, along with information about our expectations, strategies of rewards and sanctions in our Positive Behaviour Policy – see Download section at the end of this page.

Good to be Green

‘Good to be Green’ is used to help children monitor and control their own behaviour. The aim is to stay on ‘Green’ every day.

For children who generally behave well all the time and ‘Good to be Green’ is routine, the incentive to continue to behave well is built in. Staff will utilise Bronze, Silver and Gold colours to reward continuous good behaviour or specific acts of kinds, consideration of others and manners. These colours are coveted and the children themselves make a great deal of fuss whenever someone moves up to Bronze, Silver or Gold. If a child gains Gold and keeps it until the end of the day they are sent to the Headteacher or the Deputy Headteacher and their name is put in the book of Gold. They also receive a prize from the Gold or Star bag, get a letter sent home to their parents/carers and receive a mention in the school Newsletter.

Raffle Tickets

Raffle tickets can be given out by any adult in school for good manners and conduct around the school:

• being polite and courteous to their peers and staff
• helping others by opening doors or picking up litter
• good table manners at lunch
• excellent assembly behaviour
• adhering to the rules of the school areas e.g. corridors, staircases

Children can be awarded any number of raffle tickets. They put their name on the back and place in the sparkly box. Each week the raffle is drawn and the winner selects a prize from the prize basket. The more raffle tickets with your name on the more chance you have of winning.

This is a particularly good way of recognising and encouraging the kinds of behaviours that make our school community a happy and caring one and enables us to repeatedly reward and recognise children who have good manners and conduct themselves well inside and outside of the classroom.

House Points

The school is split into Four Houses – Rectory, Grove, Eagle and Priory. From Reception we have inter-House competitions and sports days. Each House has House Captains and Vice Captains. House points are used to encourage a variety of learning behaviours and achievements. Children can collect House points for lots of different reasons. For example;

• Sporting achievement
• Good sportsmanship
• Team work
• Positive attitudes to learning
• Homework
• A particularly good piece of class work

At the end of each week all of the house points from each class are collected up and put towards the House point total. The class with the highest number of points at the end of each week are awarded the House Points Cup and the House with the most points at the end of the school year are awarded the House of the Year Cup.

Star of the Week

Each week three children per class are put in the Star book to be ‘Stars of the Week’. They are chosen for particularly good learning or pieces of work. In our celebration assembly the children are invited to come out to the front and be congratulated and they may share the work or learning they have been rewarded for. They are awarded a certificate that is displayed for a week and their names go on the star of the week section on the website. They may also be awarded a small prize.

Other regular awards are for class attendance and punctuality as these behaviours and habits are also very important. The classes with the best attendance, punctuality and highest number of House points are also mentioned in the school Newsletter.

Downloads:

Positive Behaviour Policy