I am currently reading a paper that has been published by the Human Scales School Project, which is a partnership between Human Scale Education and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The idea behind Human Scale Education is to create small scale learning communities where children and young people are known and valued as individuals.
The report looked into how Stantonbury Campus, a school with 2,600 pupils, and how it manages to achieve human scale thinking in such a large school. Stantonbury Campus has divided their school into five ‘halls’ each containing around 500 pupils. The purpose of these halls is to act as mini-schools with their own individual head teacher and teaching staff.
The report is interesting in that one of the final recommendations for good practice is “Student voice involving students in the learning arrangements and organization of the school.” The way in which Stantonbury achieves this is for each hall to have their own elected school council who have control of a budget and are involved in all aspects of their hall.
We recognize that sometimes in a large school the school council does not represent all pupils, do you think by having separate school councils for different pupils will mean that the whole school is represented? Or do you think that this will mean the school will become segregated? Is there a better way of involving the whole school community in the decisions made by the school council?
Daisy