Author: Asher

Categories
SchoolCouncilsUK-archive

‘YOUth citizenship: inside and out’

Yesterday, Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Young People’s Advisory Group announced it’s first national conference ‘YOUth citizenship: inside and out‘.

The event has already sparked off much interest from all over Scotland. The idea of the day is to explore citizenship in order to make more people understand its importance and to celebrate acheivements that have been made theough citizenship.

If you would like to find out more about this event of the work of the Young People’s Advisory Group please visit their website.

Daisy

Categories
SchoolCouncilsUK-archive

Benefits of being on a school council

The Independent Schools Council this week reported that their research has shown that extra-curricular activities improve academic performance.

Whilst school councils are not necessarily an extra-curricular activity the research from isc examined how “many studies have shown that a rounded education comes from a combination of good academic grounding coupled with wider experiences outside of the classroom.” We believe that school councils provide many worthwhile experiences both in and outside the classroom which help towards a rounded education.

Furthermore, it was shown that academic success was not the only benefit of being involved with the wider school community. Pupils that are involved in more activities, such as school councils, are likely to have more friends and receive greater recognition from their peers. In addition it was shown that these students also coped better with both social and psychological adjustments.

Daisy

Categories
SchoolCouncilsUK-archive

Can school councils represent everyone in a large school?

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