It will soon be announced that St James Primary School has been chosen as a Food for Life Partnership flagship school. We are one of two primary schools selected in Surrey and one of the six in SE England. This is a great honour for St James and reflects our commitment to growing food for the school kitchen and to the promotion of healthy eating. I expect to give a full report next month of what lies ahead for us over the next two years.

Our much loved swimming pool died at the end of last summer. Some of you, as parents, helped to build it when the school moved to its present site in the early 1970s and many in the village will remember swimming in it over the last 35 years. It had a long life and has given huge pleasure to the children of St James over the years. However, we knew it was nearing the end of its life and the PTA have already saved £20,000 towards a replacement. We have now commissioned the new one and building started during the spring holiday in April. We are very hopeful that it will be ready for the summer season. However, as usual, we are still raising money to make up the £20,000 shortfall in the cost of the new and improved pool.  We hope that our Summer Ball on Saturday 28^th June in the school grounds will go a long way to raising that last bit. Tickets will soon be available from the school. The ball is a fabulous event. Why not get a table of friends together?

St James School is now working towards the highest Eco School Award, the Green Flag. This award celebrates a whole school approach to environmental issues. Caring for the environment and sustainability are part of our school curriculum and the children are very committed to being eco friendly. We compost school and kitchen waste. This is a report from Oliver and Bea in Year 6, members of the school's Green Team

So far this year the Green Team have been doing a lot to bring down the amount of waste we throw away in school. We have been measuring the amount of rubbish each class has been throwing away, some classes threw away more than others. We quickly saw the huge amounts that were being thrown away each day. To reduce this we gave each class a paper recycling box and saw the amount of rubbish go down. The rubbish is weighed each day and we have already seen a drastic reduction in the amount of waste paper thrown away in school .We have  been following the action plan to enable us to receive the Green Flag Award for Eco-schools.

Next term we will be trying to reduce the electricity the school uses.

The school registered with Eco-schools two years ago. We have already gained the Bronze award and the Silver award. You can see these displayed on the Green Team notice board in the porch at school.   

We were also pleased this year to receive the Football Association Charter Mark and the Active Schools Award. Deputy Headteacher Mr Mark Smith has led the school in working on meeting the criteria for these awards and they both recognise the commitment to improving sport opportunities at St James. The staff have enjoyed a variety of training events this year and we have introduced a greater range of games in KS2 such as tag rugby, basketball, volleyball, alongside the more traditional junior netball and football.