School council and student voice case study: Matthew Moss High School

Here’s a student voice case study from Matthew Moss High School, including some really powerful quotations from teachers and pupils. Without doubt, one of our favourite schools!

Key benefits of student voice:

The school is achieving its aims (and what it sees as the aim of schooling), which is to create:

• Students who are engaged with learning, they expect to learn and challenge staff to enable it. They leave the school with skills to continue learning. This greater ability for independent learning is recognised by local colleges and evidenced by the fact that fewer Matthew Moss High School (MMHS) students end up not in employment, education or training (NEET) after leaving the school.

• Positive relationships between staff and students, resulting in few raised voices; behaviour issues are dealt with constructively.

• The pride students feel in their school is based on how well everyone is included and treated, irrespective of race, religion, behavioural issues or physical disability.

“[Other schools will] only have Christians. This school is a lot more open. Everyone accepts everyone else. That’s what makes a good school.”

Year 10 student

“You have to be part of Matthew Moss to understand how great it actually is, how open-minded it is to students who might have a bit of behaviour problems.”

Year 9 student

Top advice:

Examine and be clear about the purpose of school. Be willing to break down, throw out or reconstruct practices, structures and pedagogy that do not help you achieve this purpose. Do not just keep on doing the same things because “that’s the way schools work”, learn from other industries, educators and academics

 “It’s about learning, because if these learners can get really powerful as learners, they will get on anywhere. There’s two parts to that: first of all people need skilling up, but they also needs practice in terms of expressing their agency. Even now the best practice in the UK, pedagogically, is to give kids a load of skills, but not let them employ them in schools. So they’re not used to it, they’re still used to being compliant, obedient, willing workers. It’s no good for them, no good for the national and international community; we want people with agency, so let kids drive. Why not? Otherwise how are they going to learn to drive?

Yeah they start off doing some project stuff and they start off getting skilled up and then increasingly it becomes enquiry-based: What do you want to learn? How are you going to structure it? And the teacher is no longer portal of all things but actually facilitator, scrutineer, mentor, coach and goes into that function. And for me that is such an important step in student voice. We’ve got a school council, [students] choosing uniform, student lesson observers, students in the interview process; we’ve got all that and it’s really important, but what’s central? What do we do for most of the time in school? It’s teaching and learning: for 30 periods a week you’re in a classroom. Now how about giving learners control of that? Because that is vital, that’s everything.”

Deputy headteacher and Learning Futures Co-ordinator

Do not separate student voice from the curriculum. Students are in classes 30 periods a week, if they cannot co-construct what is going on there then they cannot really learn to be self-managing, responsible and collaborative.

Do not expect a ‘quick fix’; this is about fundamental change to the way most schools run. This kind of change is a slow process that starts with staff, moves to students and eventually involves parents and the rest of the community.

“Take fear out of the system, forget performance management, forget league tables. 97 per cent of people want to do a brilliant job, let them. Don’t build systems for the three per cent and make the 97 per cent follow them. You get no risk, no creativity, no nothing.”

Deputy headteacher

Methods used:

Co-construction of learning

At Matthew Moss the most important aspect of student voice is for students to influence what and how they are learning. This directly engages every student in the core business of the school and their main reason for being there. The school has arrived at this method through a slow process of reflection on the purpose of the school and a re-evaluation of how to achieve that purpose. They have been heavily influenced by the ideas of management experts such as W. Edwards Deming as well as creative educators like Larry Rosenstock.

“There are 26 people in the classroom, one of whom is a teacher, harness the intellectual power of all of them to design the learning.”

Deputy headteacher

My World

In My World students use project-based learning to design their own inquiry in to a subject of their own choosing. They are given an overall heading (a current one is ‘money from nothing’ which encourages students to be enterprising with rubbish) but then under that they can choose to do almost anything. They can work with whoever they like in whatever medium. During the course of the project learners have a university-style viva where they are interviewed by teachers, governors or other learners about they have been doing and have learned. Constructive feedback is given and areas for further inquiry and ways to progress are agreed. At the end of the project (which lasts about a term) all students need to exhibit their learning and participate in another viva.

Eight periods from thirty in the week are dedicated to My World in Year 8.

“My World helps other subjects. Before My World teachers would just get you to copy off the board, but My World has helped in other subjects, it’s helped more variety in other subjects. There’s a lot of different types of learning in the classroom: there’s more hands on stuff, making things, or working on the computer, or writing, or doing presentations.”

Year 9 student

Curriculum subjects

Students have been co-constructing learning in a different way in some curriculum subjects. For example, a Year 11 science class took the first week of an eight week course to plan what would happen in the other seven. The teacher shared with them the intended learning outcomes for the course and together they decided how they would achieve them:

“They even designed their own assessment, because if the assessment is too slack, it doesn’t favour them when they get to the exam. The co-construction is so powerful: the learning-design is much better.”

Deputy headteacher

Project-based learning that allows students a say in who they work with, what they study and how they present their learning is becoming more and more common throughout the curriculum at Matthew Moss, from Key Stage 3 and in to BTEC and GCSE classes. This allows students to develop skills of self-management and inquiry as well as get deep into areas of knowledge. As well as their investigations into their own subject, students are excited by what other students are doing. In addition to people looking over one another’s shoulders, there is always a time where students formally share their learning with one another, for example through presentations or a marketplace.

“It’s better than just getting set work because you can actually do something you’re interested … I’ve have actually learnt more because I want to do it, not I have to do it.”

Year 10 BTEC Science student who was learning about bridges with a partner in a classroom where others were studying whales, the eye, rockets, the life cycle of frogs and more.

Culture of responsibility

In everything the school does people are expected to take responsibility for themselves. So students are responsible for their own learning, rather than teachers being responsible for it. Teachers not managers are responsible for creating spaces and experiences that enable students to learn. Students are responsible for their own behaviour, so instances of unacceptable behaviour result in a discussion between staff and student on why they acted as they did. Excuses are not tolerated, explanations are required. For these conversations to be entered in to students and staff all must have a voice, must have an expectation that they will be listened to and that their view will be respected.

If everyone is responsible for their own learning a simple top-down hierarchy cannot work. Everyone needs to have the opportunity to voice the view that the system is not allowing them to learn as well or as much as they would like. Voice and agency are intrinsic parts of responsibility.

Family councils

The school’s pastoral system is structured through four Families. Each Family consists of a quarter of the vertical tutor groups. Each of the Families has a council voted on through all the tutor groups during a whole-school election day. Meetings happen in each tutor group on a regular basis and the information and views from these is fed up to the Family council and back down again.

Family councils can work on whole-school issues, so one is currently looking at how PSHE is working and another is looking at the uniform. These issues are decided upon by the students. The fact that Families and tutor groups cut across all ages in the school mean that they can be more representative of whole-school feelings than a year council would be.

The intention is to move towards the Family councils as commissioners of learning as well as dealing with pastoral and environmental issues.

Working towards a school council

There is an acceptance in the school that the school council has not really been working as well as it might, but that it is an important thing to have. However, rather than looking to simply relaunch it with a new name or voting structure the school has taken a different approach: they are strengthening the tutor group meetings and the Family councils.

They understand that getting these working well is more important and simpler, as they can deal with more local, immediate issues. As these grow in confidence they know that students will see the need for a school council that co-ordinates the work of all the Family councils and will have the skills to manage it. This will allow it to grow from the bottom up, rather than be imposed from the top down.

About the school:

Matthew Moss High School is an average sized secondary school situated in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. The percentage of students with special educational needs and/or disabilities is above the national average as is the proportion of those with a statement of special educational needs. The proportion of students known to be eligible for free school meals is above average and increasing. Some 41 per cent of students are of minority ethnic background. The school has specialist science college status.

 

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