Great to hear that your PRU is linking up citizenship and student voice. So few schools, colleges and PRUs make this fundamental link.

15 minutes is a pretty short time to have a meeting, so you will need a good structure to make sure that everyone is able to participate. You’ll want to get each class to come up with their own set of rules, but you could suggest one or two basic ones to get things started. You should aim to have them running their own meetings, but you will need to run the first few, model chairing and get the students to feedback on what you are doing well. Write this up in each classroom so they are building up a picture of how to chair a meeting. This will eventually allow you to hand this over to them. I’ve written up this and some other ideas to help you with meetings here: http://www.smartschoolcouncils.org.uk/resources/school-council-meeting-ideas/

There is a sample school council policy here that I think you’ll find useful: http://www.smartschoolcouncils.org.uk/resources/school-council-policies/
Obviously you’ll need to adapt it to your situation, but the headings should give you an idea of what to include. It helps to be really clear about why you have student voice and what everyone can expect from it.

Please feel free to drop me an email, give me a call or ask more questions on here if there’s anything else we can help with.

look forward to hearing from you

kate

The best data we have on them is from Geoff Whitty and Emma Wisby’s research for the Department for Education in 2007, so whilst it’s not that recent, our experience shows that the figures haven’t changed significantly.
https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/DCSF-RR001.pdf
At that time 92% of primary schools in England had school council (see page 115)
You can draw some conclusions about what pupils and teachers think of their effectiveness from pages 41-45. There is no one answer, it partly depends on what you consider to be effective.
Hope that’s useful.