School Rewards Ideas

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School reward ideas for primary and secondary schools

Choosing activities for a rewards day

Secondary school rewards ideas that are inclusive and fun are sometimes difficult to find. Choosing which activities that the whole school can enjoy used to be difficult. You want a school rewards day that can engage your students and create the wow factor to incentivise good behaviour and reward good attendance. Let's face it their is no point going to the trouble of organising a school reward day for the young people to be a bit nonplussed after looking forward to their experience.

When children are asked 'how was the reward day?' As a school, parent, teacher or carer you do not want the standard teenager response 'It was OK'. You want the students to talk with excitement about the activities they took part in and to go into detail about what they enjoyed about the day. In short you want their rewards day to be memorable not only from a personal perspective but when completing pupil questionnaire questions surrounding 'encouraging me to look after my physical health' and 'I take part in school activities outside of lessons, like clubs, sports, music and art.' So if you can also meet some OFSTED criteria along the way is you really are on to a winner.

So it may be a good idea to get the student voice involved when planning activities. This is something over my many years of teaching we used when putting together our activity programme for the year. We set the parameters from the start with a strong hope that they would choose activities that were practical, safe, affordable and also inclusive. You also want to choose activities that have minimal impact on the workload of colleagues. All of the factors mentioned can also be relevant to primary schools rewards ideas

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Indoor Rewards Event Ideas

We are seeing many Secondary schools booking Speedkix for indoor rewards days. These are particularly popular as it means that a rewards system can be integrated into the academic year. Which means that the students have regular staging points to celebrate their success. The little and often approach really does work when implementing a successful rewards strategy for your school. Here company founder Andy Phillips, who is also PGCE Qualified, talks through some of our indoor rewards activities that can also cater for large numbers of students throughout the school day.

Some other rewards day ideas for you to think about

Residentials, in my experience residentials are a great as a means of rewarding good behaviour and excellent attendance. They are a great carrot to get young people to maintain high standards. The issue is cost and logistics and if you want a whole school rewards activity this may have implications especially if you are asking parents to help cover the cost in these difficult financial times for many families.

Foods rewards for students. Whether it is getting to the front of the dinner queue or choosing their favourite food this could be a possible inexpensive way to reward your students. However the food of choice is often not the healthiest such as pizza or foods with high sugar or salt content. Not really the types of food choices a school would want to promote.

A Theme Park trip can certainly be a lot cheaper option than a residential, there are lots of discounts flying around for school trips, but still the price per head may be high. Also with not as many logistical issues as residential. As you can take large numbers away at one time having less impact on resources for cover and time away from the curriculum.

Sports Event Similar to the Theme Park option. Not all young people are sports fans but you do not have to enjoy a particular sport to soak up the experience. I remember taking a group of students to some of the Olympics and we watched women's football at Newcastle United's ground. Ticket were relatively cheap but it was a great experience. This year we are hosting the Women's Rugby League world cup in York for instance.

On-site activity day Certainly a cost effective activity and which can involve the whole school or just specific year groups. There are a few providers such as Speedkix which can provide activities from 30-800 students a day. With a range of fun non-mainstream physical activities such as Zorbing, Archery, Problem Solving, NERF, Combat Archery and much more. Click here to find out about some of the popular activities we offer for schools