What’s your school’s ethos?
Most of the schools I meet use terms like ‘community’, ‘the school as a family’, ‘listening to and valuing all pupils’ and ’empowering learners’.
- So how do you prove the ethos of your school?
- Can you measure your school’s ethos?
Now those are a couple of tricky questions (not least grammatically). The answers I usually see are:
- You could write it above the entrance as a motto/vision/mission statement.
- Do a survey to feel if people feel ‘listened to/safe/happy/enlightened/self-actualised’ (okay, I haven’t actually heard either of the last two).
Yesterday Greg and I spent a fascinating few hours discussing something far more tangible, empowering and effective: participatory budgeting (now there’s a name to get the pulse racing!). We were at a meeting convened by the Participatory Budgeting Unit, Citizenship Foundation and ourselves and attended by several other organisations with a range of interests and experiences in the field.
The idea of participatory budgeting, as I see it, is simple:
You involve the people whose money is being spent in the decisions about how that money is spent. (Wikipedia goes into more detail, naturally)
So how does this relate to school ethos? Well, if you say you’re a school that listens to your pupils, how about listening to them on a proportion of your budget? Set a percentage, set some boundaries and a structure, listen and then act (even better, help them to act).
Like it or not money is essential to how a school works. If you really want to involve your whole school community in decision-making then that’s going to involve how money is spent. Make a statement. Involve the whole school in he process and let them see the outcomes.
This also gives you a yardstick by which to measure how you are progressing. The more trust grows between staff, students and governors; the more students learn about how the school runs; the more responsible they show themselves to be: the larger the percentage of the budget is that they help control.
Over the coming months we (the meeting organisers) intend to help produce tools and guidance to assist schools in involving all pupils in ‘PB’.