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First, the full question:
It might sound mad to some but our school have recently scrapped tutor groups! Rather than having 25-30 kids together for 20 minutes each morning we have moved to a system of 121 mentoring which is fantastic for our pupils but it means that our previous system of having year councils with reps from each tutor group is no longer relevant. This obviously has a huge impact on meetings and communication. We used to have meetings during tutor time but tutor time no longer exists and so year councils are run as a lunch time club, obviously this has resulted in a big drop in volunteers and we are really struggling to get anything done. I wondered if you have heard of any schools in a similar situation or could offer any suggestions on an alternative system we could try? For example do you have any case studies on schools that consult pupils online or use social networking / mobile phones? Any advise would be very gratefully received because I'm at a loss for what to do!!
And here's our answer:
It sounds like an interesting experiment that you school has embarked on. Tutor time is often not well used so I could well imagine that 1-2-1 mentoring could be better for students. As you say though, this does present a problem if that was the time used for meetings. Having meetings at lunch time or after school is never a great idea as it puts the school council on the same level as a club: not an essential part of school life.
Schools use all kinds of online tools for engagement and consultation, including VLE/MLEs, Facebook groups, Surveymonkey (and other surveying tools), every1speaks and blogs. Each of them have their individual strengths and weaknesses, but generally I think there is a lot to gain from using them and one major pitfall you need to be aware of.

What online tools are great for

  • Universal access: assuming everyone can get online in your school, everyone can be consulted using these tools.
  • Recording and collation of data.
  • Easy to update and get the message out (people can be alerted by email, for instance).
  • Can be managed by students.
  • May appeal to a different group than those who like to go to meetings.

The one big pitfall

Not enabling students to take action. I say this is a 'pitfall' because it is avoidable, rather than an inevitable consequence of using these tools. If you see these as THE way in which student voice happens in your school, that's when you get in to trouble. The problem is that all of these tools are essentially limited to asking people's opinions. That's an important thing to do, but the real learning and change happens when students are taking action for themselves, collaborating, negotiating and planning together.
So I think all schools should use these kinds of tools to communicate with the whole school, but the school also needs to create space for students to take action once opinions have been canvassed. You might think about how Citizenship lessons could be used to do this. You could see whether it would be possible to have weekly 'family' meetings as Wroxham School does - small groups of 2 pupils per year who meet together to talk about what the school is doing and what they want to change in the school, led by the pupils. You could think about how it would be possible to use assembly times to allow meetings to take place. Could one assembly a fortnight be a year group assembly lead by students where issues that have come up through online consultation could be brought up and people asked to volunteer to take action on each one? If no one is prepared to take action, then maybe the issue isn't really that important.