Category: Citizenship

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Citizenship involver blog News

Citizenship stays but it needs to be active

We are really happy to see that Citizenship will stay in the National Curriculum, it’s something for which, as part of Democratic Life, we have been campaigning for a long time. We hope that now the uncertainty that has hung over the subject has been lifted schools will give it the support and time it deserves.

Be The Change
This Gandhi quotation goes to the heart of citizenship: it’s not about what you do with your spare time, it’s about what you do with all your time. We’d like the curriculum to make that link clearer.

We have always argued that the best way to teach Citizenship is with the support of genuine, democratic, active student voice. How better to understand your impact on your community and society than by being involved in improving the community you spend most of your time in, your school? How better to understand democracy and its difficulties than by trying to create, manage and take part in a democratic school council? So we are somewhat concerned that the active element of Citizenship seems to have been virtually removed from this Programme of Study, all that is left is volunteering.

More than volunteering

Volunteering is a part of active citizenship, but it is far from the essence of it. Active citizenship is about the choices one makes consciously about how one interacts with society. This includes what kind of work you do, whether you pay your taxes, whether you vote, how you challenge and support institutions (including your school) as well as what you do in your free time. Getting students to research, discuss and submit responses to this National Curriculum consultation, or their school’s consultation on whether to convert to academy status is active citizenship, but it’s not volunteering. Volunteering tends to be about helping others; I would suggest that citizenship is about helping the community of which you are a part.

We will be submitting a response to the Department for Education that is generally supportive of the proposed Citizenship elements, but asks it to broaden out the active citizenship element. We’ll post that response here soon.

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Citizenship involver blog

Pathways Through Participation: lessons for schools

The excellent Pathways Through Participation project has just published its final reports (in summary and full detail). They’re really worth a read for anyone looking to improve participation in schools. Whilst their focus was on adults – what gets them in to active citizenship, what keeps them involved – the lessons they’ve drawn from it hold true for young people too.

I particularly liked these simple equations:

Why participation starts, continues or stops
Participation equations from Pathways Through Participation: Why participation starts, continues and stops.

It’s vital to remember that in a community as diverse as a school the motivations and triggers will need to be many and varied to engage a wide variety of students. Just having a school council isn’t enough. A school council that sees its role as ‘involvers‘ – as people whose job it it is to figure out what would involve other students – would be a great start. The role of the staff then is to add in the other part of the equation, creating opportunities and ensuring the resources are in place for students to take advantage of them.

Pathways Through Participation is a project of Involve (who are friends of ours, but we’re not related), the NCVO and the Institute for Volunteering Research. It was funded by the Big Lottery Fund.

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Citizenship involver blog News

School council elections: compilation of free resources

It’s the beginning of the school term.

Loads of school council elections are taking place across the country, but many of them aren’t organised as well as they could be. 

Often this is perfectly understandable; running the election is sometimes thrust upon an unsuspecting teacher, so here’s a complication of the resources we’ve got to help you out!

1. A set of 15 minute short tutor time activities to help plan a school council election:

http://involver.org.uk/2011/03/school-council-election-tutor-form-time-activities

2. Practical steps on running a school council election, setting it up and questions about if you REALLY need to have one:

http://involver.org.uk/2010/08/school-council-elections-planning-for-success/

3. Our school council reps toolkit might help students understand what’s involved as a school councillor (sometimes if they’re not sure what’s involved, they won’t put themselves forward).

http://involver.org.uk/2010/10/school-council-reps-tookit/

4. It’s important to have a think about what type of school council model (and therefore election) you need to have:

http://involver.org.uk/2011/07/school-councils-and-democracy-pick-your-model-carefully/

5. Once you’ve got your reps, then use this ‘getting to know your reps’ game:

http://involver.org.uk/2009/09/getting-to-know-your-reps-game-template/

6. Try and avoid this!

http://involver.org.uk/2009/09/school-council-election-fraud-as-it-happens/

And remember, you can always email us if you want some help or advice. Or feel free to suggest a new election resource for us to write.

Greg

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Citizenship involver blog News Student Voice Assistant's blog Twitter

How can you encourage more people to get involved in your Student Voice?

This is a question that I am sure many schools struggle with, and I’d be lying if I said Little Heath hadn’t faced this problem over the years as well. The answer to this question can be the key to success in student voice.

It might be that the attendance at your school council is dwindling, or the uptake for your new peer mentoring scheme is low, or maybe you are struggling to keep your student voice “cool”. I don’t claim to have a definitive answer but I hope to offer some practical advice that you may find useful.

Publicise it! Ensure that the students know what is going on, what your plans are and how they can be involved. Go into assemblies once every half term, produce a mini newsletter, create posters and display boards around school, go into their tutor times, send letters home. You name it, it’s possible. But most crucially get out and speak to them. Chat with them about what student voice is, what activities are available, get them to share their thoughts with you, get their advice.

Be inclusive. Don’t hand pick the good students or reject the more challenging ones when they volunteer. Each one has something to offer. It is important to go out to your students as well as expecting them to come to you. At Little Heath, our Student Voice Leaders (a small group of senior students who each take a lead on an area of Student Voice) regularly go into tutor groups to chat informally to students about their lessons and other areas of school life, but also to share with them what is going on in the student voice world.

One of the greatest, and most effective, outcomes of student voice is that students feel valued. Ensure that everyone knows that your school council, for example, is there, not just because you have to have one but because you want to hear what your students have to say. Show them that their work has impact, that it makes a difference and that it can be rewarding. This gives students a sense of ownership and that their school council is their school council.

Informal structure as well as formal structure can work. Elections are great but don’t always work for everyone. Having an informal place where suggestions can be made and students can show an interest is also really helpful. This can either be a place that allows students to drop in and share ideas with you or it might even be a suggestion box that is checked regularly.

These are just a few ideas but I hope that in some way they are helpful to you.

Alison,
Student Voice Coordinator
Little Heath School

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Citizenship involver blog News Twitter

School Councillor Profiles: Filippo from Italy

Filippo from Italy telling us about his job as a school councillor:

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Citizenship involver blog

Should we run a school?

A couple of days ago on Twitter I noticed a couple of tweets by Fiona Blacke, the Chief Exec of the NYA (National Youth Agency) that really quite excited me:

  • @edballsmp Great to hear charities can now sponsor academies. More info to follow??
  • if youth charities can run schools can we expect these will have pupil voice and empowerment at the centre of the way they run? Exciting!

    • Incredibly exciting, I thought. The chance to put into practice what we preach. Rather than looking down from our pulpits on the pupils and teachers we want to influence, we could actaully be part of running a school.  I can’t think that there would be a better way to advance our thinking on the real power and possibilities of pupil voice . It would also provide a great example to other schools, not to mention the possibilities it would provide to the pupils in such a school.

    Now, as you probably know, involver’s not exactly the most established organisation yet, so I felt it was a bit flippant for me to suggest that we run a school, but I did anyway, kind of.  Well actually I posted a question on Twitter to a few other organisations that I thought might be interested and Michael Grimes at the Citizenship Foundation picked up on this and wrote a blog post about it to get the discussion going. I’m continuing it here, so please comment on either blog with your thoughts.

    For me it just seems that this does need to be considered. Leadership by example is the only real leadership. Who’s with me?