Prize Giving Ceremonies - Teachers Decide or What?

[hullabaloo22]

Just that, really, how do schools (that hold prize winning ceremonies) decide on which students are to be awarded?

E.g. maths/science prize, form prize, academic etc etc

I don't think it comes down to end-of-year exams or necessarily overall quantitative performance, so how are they decided?

Is it down to individual teachers to nominate and, if so, what do they base their decisions on?

Call out to teachers/school staff as having discussed this with a number of friends, we're none the wiser and genuinely curious to know...

This is how I feel about athletes who get gold medals and then get knight or dame hoods.

The gold medal IS the reward. I don't know why they then get rewarded again.

It's different if they "give back" by working with grass roots sport or have achieve something phenomenal like Steve Redgrave, but they are rewarded by being paid well out of lottery money to train, by money for endorsing products etc, and they are rewarded by sporting bodies with medals for winning the competition. They don't need honours too.

I’m Head of Dept so the prizes form for English comes to me. Progress prizes go to the students who make the most progress from Autumn term to end-of-year exams. Subject prizes are on end-of-year exam achievement and then effort and participation come into it as a tie breaker (which I always ask their teachers about - no bone idle child is going to win it over a sparky child simply for not asking challenging questions). A Level subject prizes can be about exam achievement and/or overall effort, participation, consistent excellence, etc. I ask the teachers to nominate with some info and then I make the final decision with their input.

At my childrens school it was basically 2 hours of watching the same 15 kids receive awards. Both my dd were A-B students and neither played instruments or bothered with sports. The winners were always theA* students and those who excelled at extracurricular. I think sometimes schools would do to realise there's more to pupils than grades.

Exactly. Not sure Elon Musk received any prizes. Well, actually he didn't. 😕

Tim Peak got a D, E and F in his A-levels...

So all this prize-giving is a way to allocate prizes based on the school's criteria for having 'excelled' in some way.

Usually this means the most genetically enabled kids who are good at academics, sports, music and are pro-social. Especially these days.

Forget about the world-changers who find it tricky to throw a ball and aren't good at chatting...

Ho hum. Thank God school only goes up to 18 and then reality hits.