School council and student voice case study: Lark Rise Academy

Here’s another great student voice case study. This time it’s from Lark Rise Academy, who use POW WOW sessions to get everyone involved in school decision making. Inspiring!

“If you do this now, at this age and you get this empathy it can only make them better citizens.”

Headteacher

Key benefits

• Improved confidence, decision-making skills, empathy and entrepreneurialism in children across the school, not just a small group.

• Greater and deeper understanding of what is improving learning in the school.

• Improved engagement of parents with the school.

Top advice

• Create a process that regularly and systematically gathers the views of everyone in the school and feeds back on progress.

• Try out and evaluate new models of engagement. Always assess what you are doing.

• Ensure that staff are empowered at the same time as pupils. Pupil voice is not an add-on, it is part of creating distributed leadership throughout the school, so the whole-school community needs to be heard.

• Make sure that the issues discussed are important to the pupils. These tend to be things that are local and where they can see immediate impact. What happens in their classrooms and the playground fit the bill very well.

Methods used

POW WOW sessions

Pupils were finding that although the school council was effective by some measures, it was not genuinely representing all pupils. They were keen to find a new structure that would allow all pupils to be involved in decision-making about what was going on in the school. They decided to hold weekly class meetings, which they call POW WOWs. These 30-minute meetings are facilitated by the class teacher and minuted by the teaching assistant. Every class in the school will discuss the same questions, which are generally set by the headteacher. These questions tend to focus on the curriculum. This gives pupils real input into the core business of the school, learning and teaching and gives the school great information on which to evaluate what is going on in classrooms across the school.

Sometimes these are questions where the outcome will be a whole-school change, but often they are to do with what each class has been learning, how their classroom will be laid out, etc. The issues that most animate the pupils are those that affect their lives in the classroom or the playground.

Every pupil in the school is involved in POW WOW sessions, including the three-year-olds in nursery. All of their answers are listened to and noted down. This is not simply a matter of expressing preference though. Children throughout the school are asked to think about and justify their answers. This justification is very important as it enables deeper thinking about learning and forms the basis of genuine discussion. It is essential to all age groups that once the information is collated that feedback is given to them so they can see the effect of their discussions.

“Both my children needed prompting to speak, but they’re all asked their opinion and never made to think that what they say is silly.” Parent

“Everyone is given value and made to feel important. It’s helped my daughter to develop her own voice.” Parent

Community ambassadors/Play leaders/Eco-warriors

Through the POW WOW session pupils have established a number of roles whereby some pupils can take on extra responsibility:

The community ambassadors are an elected group of pupils who fulfil the roles that might be associated with a school council, but are not covered in the POW WOW sessions: interviewing prospective staff, giving guests tours of the school, representing the school at local and national events. They meet with a member of staff every Friday to share ideas for how the school can improve and decide who will get the Kindness and Caring Cups. The Community Ambassadors make their decision without knowing the name of the nominees, just what they have been nominated for.

“Ambassadors make our education better and the school funner.” Year  Ambassador

Play leaders look out for pupils in the playground who do not have anyone to play with. They also teach new games to any children who want to learn.

Eco-warriors is a club open to anyone with an interest in improving the environment. One of the methods they use is ‘Freddy the Frog’. Freddy is stuck in various places around the school where things need to change to improve the environment. This focuses attention and starts debate.

Leadership programme across the school

To ensure that all pupils can develop their leadership skills, not just those involved in the groups above, a new scheme has been started to provide recognition for pupils taking a leadership role. Pupils earn stamps for designing and carrying out a small leadership project. Collecting these stamps allows them to take on a special title in the class. These vary across the school to reflect the level of leadership activity the pupils are expected to take on at different ages:

• Nursery: Teacher’s Helper
• Reception: Class Leader
• Key Stage 1: School Leader
• Key Stage 2: Community Leader

It is totally voluntary and pupils can do almost anything that sees them taking a lead – there are some suggested activities for those who want to take part but are not sure what to do. One pupil made an Easter basket at home and then showed other children how to do it, so they could take Easter baskets home for their families. This kind of activity would have been run by a teaching assistant, so with more people leading activities there are also more activities for those who do not want to lead to be involved in. This is part of an action research project for a member of staff (see below) and the POW WOWs have deeply influenced how it looks. They discussed these questions before the scheme was set up:

• What are you going to do to get stamps?
• Would you like to take part?
• What would you like the names of the roles to be?

The scheme is already proving to be very popular. It helps pupils to understand that leadership is not necessarily top-down, it can just as well be bottom-up. It also gives pupils entrepreneurial and decision-making skills and experience of working with groups and speaking to an audience.

Action research

Many staff in the school, from the headteacher down, have been or are carrying out formal action research around pupil voice and engagement. This has encouraged them to really examine what is working in their school and to try new things. It also gives them a rigorous framework within which to experiment and assess what they are doing.

In all cases the views of the pupils form a core part of the data. So pupils have yet another avenue through which to feed in to the school’s policy and practices. As well as giving all staff deeper insight into their practice this research forms part of additional qualifications for those staff carrying it out.

About the school:

Lark Rise Academy is one of the first schools to convert to academy status under the new rules.

It is average in size. Pupils come from a wide range of backgrounds, although the percentage known to be entitled to free school meals is below average. Children begin school with standards that are broadly in line with those expected for their age. The percentage of pupils coming from minority ethnic backgrounds is below average, and of these, very few speak English as an additional language. The percentage of pupils with learning difficulties is below average. However, the percentage with statements of special educational need is higher than usually found.

The school has a number of awards.