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School councils are very often judged on what changes they make rather than the process they go through to make them. This is a reasonable thing to judge a ‘school improvement club’ on, but not something set up as democratic. Democratic structures are put in place because they are the best way of collecting the views of large numbers of people and thereby protecting all of their interests. They do not always make the quickest, most effective or even best decisions. It was often said that the Italian dictator, Mussolini, ‘made the trains run on time’. Actually this might not be true , but having a dictator did mean that complaints about late trains went down. So, either having someone taking decisions on their own meant effective decisions were made, or taking away people’s freedom of speech gave that impression any way. Why complain if can’t change the system (or if doing so might get you shot)?
Now, I’m not for one minute suggesting that your school is a fascist dictatorship, but if you put in place systems to listen to student voice you need to judge them on how well every voice gets heard. This might seem like a difficult thing to track, but here are a few tips:
- Make sure your school council minutes record exactly where each idea comes from. At the end of each term you can then have a look and see if some people, classes or years are missing. Your minutes could look like this:
Item Suggested by Brought to Year Council by Brought to School Council by Discussion Action (What, Who, When) Research project to look at library usage Daniel Sanderson, 8RW Bryony Campbell Mena Ahero - In your meetings, give each person three pebbles. When they want to speak they have to hand over a pebble. You can use this to rein in those people who dominate meetings by having a say on every point. You can also use it the other way round and say that everyone has to use up all their pebbles, so everyone has to contribute 3 times.
Have a class council noticeboard somewhere prominent in the school, listing all the classes in the school. Mark off when each meeting was held, how many things your class will be doing as a result and how many ideas you passed on to the Year Council. (See the image on the right)- Have a class council noticeboard outside each form room with a one line description of each of the actions and ideas your class council came up with at your last meeting. Include a name for who to talk to about each one in case someone who sees it is interested to help or find out more.
- Think about whether your class, year or house representatives need to be there to speak on behalf of the people they represent (as MPs do) or whether they could just pass on the views of the people they represent. E.g. ‘I am passing on my class’s 28 votes on this issue: 12 for and 16 against’. Could you use delegated voting (‘liquid democracy’) or direct democracy (the diagram on the left shows how this works)?
Choose a system because it works the best for representing everyone’s views, not just because it’s the system you’ve used before.
