Daring to be their best selves!

The Year 6 pupils at Howe Green House School have been lucky enough to participate in the Prince William Award and graduated last week in a ceremony to celebrate their achievements throughout the project.

The Prince William Award is a pioneering character and resilience programme to help children dare to be their best. The Award is being delivered in partnership with schools across the UK and focuses on five key principles: personal development, relationships, working together, community and the environment. The majority of The Prince William Award students demonstrate real, tangible progress in the essential elements of character, for example resilience and self-confidence.

Over the course of the year, the children took part in many team building games designed to improve their listening skills, confidence and problem solving abilities. As part of the programme, they were also was involved in a project to refurbish the school’s nature area. This provided them an opportunity to put all these skills to good use. Mr Sydes, the Year 6 Form Tutor said, “The nature area was becoming a little tired so we decided to refurbish this as part of our project. I was pleasantly surprised at how enthusiastic they were about it, they worked extremely hard for countless hours and as a result, the area is now looking fantastic.”

The class found the experience rewarding in many different ways. Noah, a pupil in Year 6 said, “Before the Prince William award, my leadership skills were not the best, but since doing all the activities, they have improved an incredible amount.” Arabella, another member of the class said, “my resilience has improved a lot because the instructor was so nice and helped me to believe in myself.”

This is the first year the school has taken part in the Prince William Award. We are delighted to see how this scheme has built upon the aims and ethos of our school, and helped equip our pupils with resilience and self-confidence as they leave us to begin their next steps at secondary school. We believe that children can ‘be anything and go anywhere’ and we can’t wait to see what amazing things our next Year 6’s can achieve!