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
Category: SchoolCouncilsUK-archive
Well, not quite, but it’s an interesting project being piloted in Cambridge. Kids are being given cards that entitle them to £500 to spend on specified activities. It’s Government funded to the tune of £1 million. Full story
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
It’s here if you want to see it:
We’re the only partner, which is good, but it would have been nice to have our logo on every page.
Asher
One of the articles I found on Voice It1 (see previous post), written by one of the student ‘journalists’ was about the newly created position of Chair of the Youth Citizenship Commission. This commission will:
- Examine what citizenship means to young people.
- Consider how to increase young people’s participation in politics; the development of citizenship among disadvantaged groups; how active citizenship can be promoted through volunteering and community engagement.
- Lead a consultation on whether the voting age should be lowered to 16.
It has a small budget attached (£6m). I think we should try to get a meeting with him and see whether he will support the Standard (and maybe more).
Full article >>
At my meeting with Futurelab one of the other people there was from synergy.tv. One of their big projects is www.radiowaves.co.uk which allows schools to create their own radio stations for free. This could be a great tool for school councils. An offshoot of this is Voice It! which is particularly about using those tools for campaigning.