Mini Police take to the stage

Our youngest recruits have once again taken to the stage to celebrate their success at their very own Mini Police Awards Ceremony.

Children from all 20 of our schools held their awards assemblies over the past few weeks, recognising the hard work and effort that they’ve put in this year.

During the year, the children have been very excited to learn and meet various teams, including police officers in different roles, exploring various police vehicles, watching the police dogs in action and even meeting their local firefighters.

They've learnt about a range of topics such as the importance of the role of the police in the community, water safety with the RNLI, anti-social behaviour, cyber safety, pedestrian safety, hate crime and fire safety.

They have also been out in their community making a difference by encouraging drivers to slow down, visiting residents in care homes and sharing crime prevention and cyber safety messages to family and friends.

At the end of the program, within every school a child will win an award called the ‘I made a difference award’. This award goes to a child within the programme who has made the biggest difference to their community.

In addition to that, we give out a Mini Police Officer of the Year award, which is given to one child across all 20 of the schools. This award is for a child that has learnt from the Mini Police programme and put their new skills into practice to make a difference at the school, with their classmates, within their family and within the wider community.

Out of all of the schools we could only have one winner. This year our overall winner was Mittchell Fitzroy Smith from Landau Forte Academy Moorhead.

Mittchell won the award for many reasons. He has found communication challenging throughout his school career and yet despite this, he has participated fully in all aspects of the Mini Police programme.

This has been enabled by the work he's done with PC Jim and the fantastic camaraderie they have built, which enables Mittchell to fully thrive within these sessions.

Mittchell will still find non-verbal ways of communicating but has started to put up his hand to ask and answer questions in front of his whole class and year group. His enthusiasm for the programme has been a delight to see as he clearly looks forward to the weekly sessions. Well done Mittchell!

We’d like to thank all of the children for their hard work over the last year, their awards are very well deserved, and we can’t wait to see how they plan to continue their community efforts.