Over to Corby in Northamptonshire for another great school in our amazing school council and student voice case study series!
Key benefits
- Students are able to communicate in a relaxed and confident manner.
- Creativity and student voice are seen as interlinked, so this helps the school be creative in how it involves students and in turn students have made lessons more creative.
- Lessons have become more engaging as a result of student comments in response to consultation on the raising achievement plan (RAP, the school development plan).
“It’s absolutely tangible, you can see it, the confidence of young people and the confidence of teachers to listen to young people. [Pupils] really make their own choices now.”
Year 4 teacher
Top advice
- What you are doing has to be purposeful. Students need to know what their role is and that that it has potency. Set objectives, goals and targets. It is not effective if the students are not sure why they are doing it.
- Have weekly class meetings so you can deal with everything that comes up.
- Make sure that the class representatives have someone in their class to take notes for them. That way they can take a full part in the meeting and still have notes to help them remember everything they need to relay to the school council.
- Have two-year terms on school council, so you roll over experience and expertise.
Methods used:
Young Consultants
“It’s an amazing learning curve for them. The children involved can speak and think about how they learn and what they want to be learning about.”
Creative Partnerships Co-ordinator
Through Creative Partnerships Studfall has been working with a local secondary school to develop creativity in their curriculum. They feel that rather than creativity just being about the arts, it is about how they involve children in all of their work. So they formed a group of young consultants (YCs) to be the pupil voice within the Creative Partnerships work they were doing. To ensure this was not tokenistic they gave them clear roles and training.
Initially the YCs were involved in interviewing practitioners that the school was considering working with, but it has grown from there. They decided that the YCs should observe the sessions being run by the practitioners so they could further develop their understanding about what skills a good creative practitioner uses. This has then grown in to involving the YCs in planning sessions with adults and researching how Studfall pupils like to learn. This practice is now expanding throughout the school with several teachers working through schemes of work with YCs.
To develop this creativity it has been essential to give pupils the space and freedom to make a lot of choices about their learning.
School council
The school council meets weekly to discuss issues that have come up in the class council meetings (also held weekly). These meetings happen during assembly time, so when one half of the school is having an assembly the other half is meeting in class groups.
Pupils were finding that not everyone was confident or able to speak up during class meetings, so they created two other methods for people to speak more privately to their representatives. Every Wednesday there is a school council surgery. There is also a suggestions box in to which people can either put anonymous suggestions or their names if they would like to speak to a school councillor, but not in front of the whole class.
Whole school involvement in writing the RAP
The school council has been involved in running a consultation on the RAP. Each week they asked all the classes in the school a different question related to an area of the RAP. Their responses have been fed into the RAP and also fed back directly to teachers. Pupils can see the effects in their classrooms and are very pleased.
“Some children were saying there’s not enough challenges at the start of lessons, so they were just sitting there waiting for all the other children to come in. So we talked to our teachers at their team meeting and we told them. And they took on what we said, and now we have lot more, so they’ve listened. Children are actually pleased.”
Year 6 pupil
Buddies
Everyone in the school has a buddy, Year 6 are buddies with Year 4 and Year 5 are buddies with Year 3. These are assigned when the new Year 3 join the school so that they have people who can show them around and help them settle in.
The buddy system extends beyond this though with students doing shared activities and lessons with their buddies and buddies helping one another academically. This relationship persists throughout their time at the school and the pupils clearly enjoy being buddied up, in fact they are arguing at the moment for more time to spend with their buddies.
About the school
The school is much larger than average. A few pupils are from a range of minority ethnic groups. A third of all pupils have special educational needs and/or disabilities which is significantly higher than usual. There is designated special provision for 33 pupils with statements of special educational needs and, together with those in school, they account for 10 per cent of pupils. This is exceptionally high compared to other schools.
The proportion of pupils known to be eligible for free school meals is below average. A breakfast club is organised by the school each morning for approximately 30 pupils. Two headteachers lead and manage the school.