involver is a new social enterprise that aims to involve every pupil in their school community through inspiring pupil voice, and smart school councils. We believe that effective participation in schools:
- involves everyone – not just the brightest or most confident pupils, but also the quiet or badly behaved ones.
- encourages and facilitates action.
- is fun for those involved, and contributes to personal development.
involver provides a central resource, training, consultancy, free guidance and research to help schools move towards this. Our work develops the skills and capacity of young people (and the adults that work with them) to create and maintain the sustainable democratic structures that work for them. We want to build a better understanding of what effective participation is about, raise aspiration, and challenge the tokenistic school councils that disengage young people across the UK.
You can find out more about the projects we’re involved with.
Or learn a little more about us:
Asher Jacobsberg has been involved in youth leadership since he was at school himself. At school he pushed forward democratic student voice, including having students on the interview panel for the new deputy head. He’s proud to say his old school still sees this as a very important part of their interview process – he’s a bit less proud to admit that he started this over 13 years ago. Asher was also elected chairman of Rugby Youth Council around 1996, unfortunately the Borough Council then disbanded it as they didn’t like losing control of what it was saying.
At the same time Asher was moving into leadership roles with ULPSNYC-Netzer (now LJY-Netzer) a democratic, peer-led, Jewish youth movement. Eventually Asher rose to become the Camps Organiser, Treasurer and then General Secretary of the whole movement, representing and training other young people and assisting them to run educational, fun events, camps and trips.
For the last six years Asher has been working for School Councils UK and occasionally as a freelance citizenship consultant. In this time he has run training for students and staff in all types of schools; written many guides and sessions on how to get the most out of their school council. In the last couple of years his main work has been to develop a national set of standards for school councils and a method for assessing them, writing the School Councils Organiser and conducting research for the SSAT and DCSF into best practice in pupil voice methods being used across England. Asher’s pioneering work with School Councils UK has placed him as one of the UK’s leading experts on school councils and student voice.
That said, Asher has a bit of a problem with the term ‘pupil voice’, he feels strongly that genuine, active involvement is what’s important and that ‘pupil voice’ is often far too passive:
Giving someone a voice is one thing; listening to it is another; but letting people take action to identify and solve their own problems is what we have to aim for.
Greg Sanderson jumped straight into getting young people more engaged with politics when he finished university. Firstly by writing Citizenship resources for the Hansard Society Scotland; looking at how Parliamentary politics could be made exciting and applicable for people at school. After several years working in Edinburgh, Greg moved down to London to work for School Councils UK. There he continued to write, but also developed into creating policy and writing and running training for school staff and young people. Greg worked particularly closely with local authority staff who had a remit to support participation.
In 2008 Greg was selected to go on secondment to the Citizenship and PSHE Team of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), where he was able to be part of policy development from the other side of the fence. This combination of experiences and skills makes Greg something of a guru in the practical application of active involvement in the Citizenship curriculum. He is also advising the region of Kosice, Slovakia on youth democracy, and is a Governor of Church Lane Pupil Referral Unit in the London Borough of Brent.
Alongside his interest in pupil involvement in schools, Greg is a great musician and believes that through music more young people can become actively engaged in their learning. So as well as setting up involver he is also hoping to establish Rock2Learn with his band mates to do just that.
