DCSF Guidance Looks At How Schools Can Get Pupils To Participate –
New advice on how to get young people involved in their school and learn important citizenship skills, for example through ‘buddying’ younger pupils and encouraging them to study or improve behaviour was published today, announced Schools Minister Jim Knight.
Author: SchoolCouncilsUK-Mark
Massive brand new school nobody from host school knew about the last session, so there was no-one from the host school there, 15 boys and two girls from another school. Engaged enough from the demonstration but it was lacking in atmosphere, only 17 in a big hall. graffiti wall went OK. First two sessions were really buzzing. Not a lot of communication within the school. Link person wasn’t a teacher – member of admin staff and didn’t know how to get in touch with the right people. Meanwhile the teachers that did come (“only knew about it 20 minutes ago”) were saying they would really have liked to have brought the school council. Girls got into it and came up with some good ideas and went through the project planner successfully. os/mj
We did the first session. Link teacher very involved; school council teacher very keen and wanted to get the councillors down but couldn’t get them out of lessons – interested in Network membership. Wanted to take project planners back to the citizenship classes. Only had a half an hour session and anticipated 75 pupils (only around 53 in the end) so decided to set the room up cabaret style. Everything had to be set up in advance; Graffiti wall on one wall but had to stick it on one side panel of the kitchen. What was really good was that even though we were limited for time and only had three council members in the session, there was enough interest and enthusiasm from the kids that the session went quite well. The headteacher sat in with one of the groups, the contact teacher was around nearly the whole time, and a couple of other teachers were sitting in and watching, saying how useful the project planner would be in their citizenship classes and asked for lots of extras. Late morning sessions were about an hour long and we ran the graffiti wall again and we were able to go through the project planner briefly. os/mj
4 March 2008
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has announced the preferred bidder for the contract to deliver Teachers TV.
Education Digital 2, a consortium of Ten Alps PLC and ITN, is in final negotiations over the £50m five-year contract to provide high quality news, information and resources to people who work in schools.
Mark Link
Mark had a meeting with David Regis from SHEU on Friday (Greg joined us for most of the meeting). SHEU has carried out “lifestyle – health and social – surveys with hundreds of thousands of young people for over 30 years”. Local authorities and others pay them to do surveys (as a base line/ monitoring exercise) – the schools participate in return for getting a comprehensive report showing them how they are doing and compare their results with other schools in their area that they can use .
Categories
Admissions…
Heard on Radio4 (Boadcasting House) 2 Mar 08 by mj: Tomorrow is A Day. Admissions Day; the long-awaited morning when half a million fretful parents will learn whether their child has got into the secondary school of their choice. For months parents have being saying things ‘We’re hoping he’ll get into this marvellous school just outside Calais. It’ll mean Timmy leaving the house 4.30 every morning to catch the Eurostar, but I think it’s worth it don’t you…’