Over the last few weeks we’ve been into a number of schools for different reasons, and each time we’ve needed to get online and go to our website. In every case it has been blocked: the schools’ filtering systems saying this is either because it is a blog or ‘webchat’.
As you can see from looking around our site there is nothing here to concern anyone, and (we hope) much that would be useful to students, teachers and other school staff. The same is true of most of the blogs I ever visit. Here are just a few that I’ve visited recently that Netsweeper who through LGFL provide filtering for most London schools would categorise as blogs that many schools then choose to block en masse:
By blocking these sites not only is that valuable information lost to the people who would find it most useful, but, more importantly, an opportunity to educate students on how to use the web intelligently and safely is lost.
Rather than simply blocking these sites, the same filtering systems could be used to offer advice and tools in an overlay or sidebar.
When a site is blocked, these are the three things a student can do in school. None of them offer the school the chance to educate or supervise the student.
A far better alternative would be to allow access but to provide warnings about the risk of trusting certain types of sites, information and guidance on how to work out what is trustworthy and give people the chance to report problematic sites and content:
How a browser might look with a clear warning about the risk of blogs (or other types of sites) without blocking the site itself.
Schools could create their own warning and guidance or use default ones provided by the same people who currently do the web filtering. This would teach safe and sensible use of the web, which young people need as they will be using it unsupervised at home , work or (increasingly) in the palm of their hand.
Little Heath School in Reading is a school that we’ve worked with for a while now. We were really pleased to be invited to their annual student voice conference a few weeks back.
Little Heath is a great example of the benefits that can be gained when young people are given trust and responsibility to influence core areas of their education. The school has six student voice groups, each of which have a special job in the school. These are:
The Building group (looking at school environment)
What makes a good lesson group (teaching and learning)
The Independent Learning group (trying to define independent learning)
Safe to learn group (Anti-bullying)
STARS project (students as researchers)
The school council’s job is to coordinate these groups, with the help of the Student Voice Leaders. The Student Voice Leaders led the whole day from start to finish, and the school’s commitment by taking around 150 students (from the various groups) out of school, to a conference venue was great. They were able to get a lot done in a short space of time. Very impressive!
The secret to Little Heath’s success in getting so many young people involved stems from three things, I think.
Firstly, culture and ethos in the school – it’s clear from the style of relationships that teachers genuinely want to hear what students think, will take it seriously, and want to set up ways to encourage this more formally. Staff are willing to run with their ideas, and recognise that good school democracy/citizenship is often a bit of a step into the unknown. They also understand that trusting young people is not losing power – it’s helping everyone to work together in the same direction.
Secondly, with so many different groups, a school council, and student voice leaders, they are able to get a wide range of young people involved because there is a wide range of ways to be involved – pretty simple really!
Thirdly, the priority given to student voice is more than just words; it’s a member of staff’s job to support and facilitate it. Jon Linz, the very talented and passionate student voice coordinator, has dedicated time in his week to support this work.
Anyway, enough from me – here’s more from the students themselves:
@PennyAW Exactly. Met a trainer recently who said 'all teachers want to do the best for their pupils', TES seem to give the lie to this. in reply to PennyAW#
Asher and I had a interesting meeting with Ade Sofola of the Citizenship Foundation yesterday.
She leads on an interesting project at the Foundation – Youth Act, which supports groups of 11–18 year-olds to identify issues of concern to them and their communities and to develop campaigns to tackle them.
In terms of skills, this has a fair amount of crossover with what we’re trying to do in schools, and we both agreed that how we present democracy/political engagement/citizenship to young people is key to the success of our work. If it’s mixed up with some fun, some passion and some ‘greater good’ then it’s more likely to work.
We had an interesting discussion about how we might work together in the future, it will be interesting to see how this develops.
It’s always good to associate ourselves – and work with – organisations and projects that are engaging young people who don’t usually get engaged, rather than giving skills to those who always take part. This project definitely seems like it’s the former.
Anyway, here’s Ade talking about the importance of skills in her work:
What better way to kick off a cold January week, than to read our response to the Cabinet Office’s call for evidence on Personalisation and learning. We really do treat you don’t we?
That said, there is exciting elements of this which hint at the direction that involver is beginning to take. This has been on our minds since we got back to work after New Year, and we’ll hopefully have it firmed up by the end of the week.
Anyway, read on..
About us
involver is a social enterprise that aims to involve every pupil in their school community through inspiring pupil voice, and smart school councils. We help young people to lead on active projects and call this ‘doing democracy’. We do this by providing free support and advice to schools, training, and working in partnership with other organisations.
Schools are teaching young people about democracy all the time – through the curriculum, and through student voice and school councils. But for most this is a negative experience. We are taking a new approach – not congratulating schools for engaging the engaged, but challenging them to think about how to involve everyone in an active way.
What do we believe about personalisation in schools?
School motto at Ashley School, Widnes
The Children Plan wants to ‘make this the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up’. Personalisation in education is key to this, but for it to really work, young people must also understand this world they live in, and how they fit into it.
Young people must understand their own needs, but also the needs of others. They must understand how services work for them, but how they also work for others. Learning about the role of their peers helps them to understand their own role. It is important that personalisation is always balanced with inclusion.
The school motto at Ashley School – a special school for students with moderate learning difficulties in Widnes – captures this well:
‘all different, but all together’
The values that underpin the secondary curriculum are also relevant here: ‘the self’, ‘relationships’, ‘diversity’ and ‘the environment’. Personalisation should start with ‘the self’, and from there use this to enhance learning about ’relationships’. This will in turn help young people to learn more about ‘the self’.
There is a danger in the current presentation of personalisation that it is about how society and institutions must respond to an individual, rather than how they respond to all the individuals they serve. This is unnecessarily individualistic and leads to negative outcomes:
A misunderstanding that if ‘I’ don’t get exactly what ‘I’ want ‘I’ am being disrespected or ignored.
An assumption that a service is not responsive because it does not do what ‘I’ want, as there is no understanding that this has to be balanced with the demands of all other service users.
By more deeply engaging young people in the whole process – i.e. seeing them not just as recipients of the service but involving them in the design, delivery and evaluation – there are huge benefits to the individuals and the service. These include:
Learning how to balance a variety of needs.
Understanding the difference between those things that would exclude people and those things that would encourage more people in.
A greater affiliation to the service because not only is it responsive but young people feel a sense of ownership of it.
Personalisation through student voice
Our work helps to enable young people to work with teachers to personalise their own education inclusively. Effective participation helps young people to decide what is important to them, and we help schools to build the ethos and structures to facilitate this.
It is important that these methods are sustainable and, where appropriate, democratic and participative. It is important for us that the sector, commissioners and Government help to build a better understanding of what effective participation is about, and raise aspiration for what it can achieve.
It’s not just consulting young people, or asking them to come up with a list of problems that they have with their learning, or their school. Personalisation, through student voice, is about young people having trust and responsibility to work as partners, or ‘co-creators’, on the core work of their education.
Barriers
There are a number of barriers which stand in the way of this work. Many schools, and adults that work with young people, aren’t willing to trust young people to lead and act on their thoughts, issues and needs. Young people respond well to trust and responsibility, but many teachers aren’t willing to take the chance. Even if they are, many teachers find it difficult to take a back seat and facilitate rather than teach.
In many schools, there is also a narrow view of what can be achieved through personalisation. Young people should be given the support, tools and opportunities to personalise teaching and learning for themselves, and not just recommend which charity is supported that year on non-school uniform day (although that is important).
Empty ‘promises’ are also a problem. Schools often say that young people should lead on a particular project, when they really mean consultation. The level of participation (where it fits on the ‘ladder of participation’) should be made clear at all times, and discussed with the young people. Schools also often feel that everything associated with participation needs to be called democratic. It doesn’t, and this can be confusing. A co-opted student action group evaluating assessment in the school, and recommending how to improve it, is participative and worthwhile, but isn’t democratic – so schools labelling it as such mislead students about what democracy is. Helping personalisation in education to be joined-up and sustainable is also an issue. Schools need to have structures and policies in place to ensure that when a keen cohort of students leaves the school, or a teacher, this work continues. A group of students, for example a school council, need to coordinate the work, and ensure that everyone is working together, and can feed into the process if they wish.
Finally, there is a worry that only the most engaged, and disengaged, participate in personalised learning, and personalised education through student voice. Young people in the middle need to be engaged too.
Overcoming barriers
The Government and commissioning bodies should respond to these barriers by funding innovative projects, models and organisations that:
Ensure that personalisation is always balanced with inclusion.
Spread models and examples of good practice to the teaching community. This will encourage adults who work with young people to trust them to lead.
Fund new research to build a better understanding of what can be achieved through personalisation and student voice. Spread these messages to raise aspiration amongst schools who are not confident to do this work.
Help local authorities and schools to understand that participation does not always need to be at the same level on ‘the ladder’.
To engage all young people in the school, provide a variety of engagement methods – online, group work, research, creative etc. This will attract more than the usual suspects, and provide many avenues for involvement.
Increase funding in Citizenship CPD courses to allow more teachers to learn skills in facilitation.
