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Welbourne pupils take over involver

Takeover Day 2011 logoOn Friday 11 November, Tottenham-based, social enterprise, involver, will be taken over by pupils from Welbourne Primary School. Four pupils will be made Directors of involver for a day, running the organisation and deciding on its future strategy.

This is being organised as part of a national day of action by young people, co-ordinated by the Children’s Commissioner for England, under the banner of Takeover Day 2011.

The enterprising young pupils will be writing new resources for other schools to use, blogging about their day, calling up Haringey schools to talk about working together and creating a strategy for involver to follow for the rest of the year.

Martell, 11, who will be one of the Directors for a day, is excited by the opportunity, “I think it’s good that we’re going to get to run involver, because their business is about schools and kids, so we’ll have good ideas about what they could do.”

Asher Jacobsberg, one of involver’s founders and it’s (current) Director, said, “We help schools to get young people learning about democracy by playing an active part in running their schools, so this is a great opportunity for us to practice what we preach. I think we’ll finish this day with better, more relevant ideas for how we can help primary-age students than we could come up with in a year on our own.”

Maggie Atkinson, Children’s Commissioner for England said: “I am very excited about our fifth Children’s Commissioner’s Takeover Day this year, and I look forward to hearing about what people are doing. The day provides such a brilliant opportunity for children and young people to make a difference to their schools and communities, have their voices heard and challenge the stereotypes about them that we hear too often. Children and young people have so much to offer. They bring ideas, imagination and energy which can really make a difference to organisations.”

The Welbourne pupils will start by learning about what a social enterprise is and then move on to the real work: creating a strategy for involver’s work with primary-age pupils. Once they’ve thrashed that out they will be starting to put it in to action.

Pupils might end up outlining books to help school councils involve the whole school, organising events for Haringey schools, or writing sessions for training other young people. Involver are clear that what the Welbourne pupils do really is up to them, they are the bosses.

Involver have committed to carry through on the strategies decided by the young people and credit them as colleagues on any materials arising from their work.

Download the media release: [download id=”239″]

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Ways to run school council meetings

These are a few ideas for how you can run discussions in your school or class council meetings. In fact you could use them in any meeting really.

Method Good for Be aware of
Yes/No/Maybe – designate a different area of the room for each answer. Ask the question and get people to stand in the area that represents their answer. Ask people to explain their reasoning and persuade others.

A more sophisticated version is an ‘opinion line’ where participants place themselves along a line to show how strongly they agree/disagree with something.

A further level of sophistication is to make a graph with 2 axes (e.g. difficulty vs importance or agree vs care).

 Getting people out of their seats.

Pushing people to explain their reasoning.

Getting different people talking.

Being a physical demonstration of changing opinion and persuasion.

 Peer pressure: people not wanting to stand on their own. You can often avoid this by starting with trivial questions and supporting and praising those who do stand on their own.
Passing the ‘conch’ – an object is passed around and only the person with that object can speak.

Different rules can be applied: e.g. when you have the ‘conch’ you have to speak; the ‘conch’ has to be passed round the circle; the ‘conch’ can be passed to anyone you like; the conch only goes to those demonstrating good listening.

 Stopping interrupting: it gives a very clear signal of who is supposed to be speaking.

Can help quieter people to speak, because they know they won’t be interrupted and/or they are required to.

 The ‘conch’ becoming a distraction.

Meetings becoming slow if there is no Chair to pass the ‘conch’ on.
Small groups – set the question and then split the class in to small groups (3-6). Ask them to discuss it and come up with one answer that they can all agree on. Have one person from each group give their group’s answer and reasoning. Allows everyone to have a say without taking too long.

Encourages compromise within the small group.

 One person dominating a small group.

If all the small groups come up with different answers coming to a conclusion may need further discussions.
Losing your marbles – give each person 3 marbles. When someone speaks they have to hand over a marble, so once they’ve contributed three times they need to stay quiet. You can also turn this round and say by the end of the meeting everyone needs to have lost all of their marbles. Making sure the meeting isn’t dominated by a few people.

Encouraging people to consider what is really important for them to contribute to.

Keeping track of who contributes and who doesn’t.

 Having everyone run out of marbles before the end – you need to make sure everyone knows what is coming up, so they can plan when to use a marble.

What methods do you use to liven up your meetings and ensure that everyone gets a say?

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Primary school council policy

The new headteacher of Welbourne Primary School in Tottenham – the school I’m a governor of – has asked me to help set up a new school council. My first step is to come up with a draft policy that I’ll use as the starting point for discussions with staff and pupils.

Download this sample policy to adapt and use: [download id=”240″]

I’m obviously trying to keep it short and simple so everyone can understand it. Here’s my first attempt. I’ll update it as the discussions progress. Do you have any comments or suggestions?

The 10 Commandments from flcikr/jbtaylor
Well, I couldn't quite get it down to 10, but it's what we're aiming for.

What is our school council for?

  • The school council is about:
    • Learning to work together
    • Learning about democracy
    • Learning how to play a positive role in our community
  • The school council’s job is to involve everyone, not do everything. It needs to get everyone:
    • Finding things they want to change
    • Coming up with ways to make them better
    • Putting those ideas in to action
    • Seeing what works (evaluating)

How does our class council work?

  • Our whole class has a meeting every 2 weeks on [day] at [time].
  • We decide what we’re going to talk about the day before the meeting, so everyone has time to think.
  • A different person runs the meeting each time (with help from the teacher if they need it).
  • A different person takes notes each time (with help from the teacher if they need it).
  • We choose two people from our class to go to a whole school council meeting.

What will the school council do for our class?

  • When you give your class representative an idea, she or he will:
    • Note it down
    • Take it to the next school council meeting
    • Tell you what is happening to your idea within two weeks
  • The school council will try to make your idea happen by getting:
    • Permission
    • Support
    • Money
    • Time
  • If they can’t they will tell you why not.
  • If they can, they will want your class to help make your idea happen.

What will teachers and TAs do for the school council?

  • Make sure meetings happen when they are supposed to.
  • Support pupils to run meetings.
  • The Headteacher will answer all the school council’s questions within 1 week.
  • If the Headteacher has to say ‘no’ to anything, she will explain why.

Now, this isn’t as short and snappy as I’d hoped, but I think it’s a good start. We’ll see what we can cut out as we go, without losing the essence of it. We’ll also be trying to create a pictorial version. I’m sure doing that will help us work out what’s really essential.

Download this sample policy to adapt and use: [download id=”240″]

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Who decides? Student voice boundaries and possibilities

This is a great little session to do at the beginning of the year when you’re trying to figure out what you want your school council (or student voice more broadly) to get involved with.

I think it works particularly well when you have groups of staff and students in the same room and then get them to look at one another’s lists at the end.

  1. Download these cards and cut them up (each group needs one set): [download id=”238″]
  2. Split people into small groups. If working with pupils and staff together have separate staff and pupil groups.
  3. Get them to sort the cards as a group, discussing each one briefly as they go.
  4. You can ask different groups to do:
    • As it is now
    • How they think it should be
    • How they think pupils/staff want it to be (whichever they aren’t)
  5. Get the groups to look at one another’s cards and discuss any differences or surprises.

You can do this is a short session (15 minutes) but if often provokes quite a lot of debate, so it can easily stretch to 45 (15 minutes sorting and 30 discusing).

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The new Ofsted framework will undermine student voice

The new framework for school inspections released by Ofsted today removes all pressure on schools to involve their students in self-evaluation and improving their own community.

When schools are being blamed for not connecting young people with their communities, a key tool that helped young people to see that their communities are what they make them, not something that happens to them, has been swept away.

Under the previous Ofsted framework student voice (and thereby the importance of students to the school community) was emphasised in three ways:

  1. Schools had to show in their Self-Evaluations Forms (SEFs) how they had engaged with and listened to students as part of their on-going strive to improve.
  2. Ofsted inspectors met with students who had been elected by their peers as their representatives (the school council).
  3. Ofsted wrote a clear, simple letter direct to students (via the school council) explaining the key findings of their inspection.*

All of these have disappeared.

All of them showed students that they had a stake in the school and their own education, they were not just raw material with which good teachers would make good grades and bad teachers would make bad grades.

Letter stating that Ofsted are on their way to inspect the schoolNow it has been pointed out to me that good schools will do this anyway and I’m sure they will because they’ve seen the benefits, but it’s about getting those other schools to try it so they also see the benefits. Showcasing and sharing good practice is important but it can never provide the same impetus for schools that feel too nervous or busy to try things that the carrot/stick of an Ofsted grading can.

Once schools do get over that first hurdle they see how teaching and learning can be improved, how pupils’ self-confidence and communication skills grow and how pupils come to have a greater respect for a community they feel respects them. One of the most positive things Ofsted did was help schools take that first step. I fear that the new Ofsted framework will further widen the gap between those students who feel their community listens to them and those who don’t. We will end up with schools that produce young people with high grades but no skills with which to apply them. No understanding of teamwork, compromise, respect or self-determination. That’s not to say that the schools that do actively encourage students to express their views, collaborate and be critical thinkers won’t also get high grades, far from it, but their students will have so much more on top of the grades.

So what could Ofsted do? Well, given that they’re not going to reinstate the SEF, they should at least do numbers 2 and 3 above. They should extend to students the system that they will be releasing in October for surveying parents; this will give a much more complete and detailed picture (as staff and governors will be spoken to directly). They also need to define far more carefully what they mean by ‘take account of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils when judging the overall effectiveness of the school’. But if they don’t act fast I think we will see a still nascent area of learning, student voice, disappear in many schools and with it any constructive way for many students to feedback on, engage with and improve their schools.

* This was also published online and I bet it was pretty useful to many parents too, as it was much easier to read than the formulaic, lengthy and jargon-heavy main reports. Have a look for yourself (the letter to the pupils is at the bottom): Welbourne Primary School Ofsted Report 2009

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‘How to’ guide on student voice

Here’s the first part of our findings from a brilliant research project that we worked on for the Children’s Commissioner.

It’s all about best practice in student voice, and here’s a short ‘How to’ guide with as much advice as we could possibly fit onto two pages. Feel free to download and share.

You can download here: [download id=”237″]

The research came from in-depth research in 16 schools across England who have great student voice, and looking at the values, principles and practices that underpin their success. Great to see so many and varied benefits that schools are seeing. There’s a full report to be issued in a few weeks.

Thank you to the schools that took part, and for the Children’s Commissioner for getting us in to do such a great project!

Greg