Thinking about communication, it's not just assemblies and noticeboards.
The Albion High School in Salford (Manchester) had a problem with its school council, as in many schools it was seen as ineffective and so became very unpopular with students. Staff and governors set improving pupil voice as a key priority for the school. With help from Creative Partnerships they have rebranded and reconstituted the school council, which is now known as REGENERATE. It has a significant budget (£30,000) and members of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) provide direct support.
Having trained a number of Salford school council co-ordinators the other week I was invited to help run REGENERATE’s training yesterday – I was even billed as “Asher Jacobsberg: National Leader on Student Voice and Involvement” which was a bit of an ego massage! The day was opened by the Chair of Governors and the Headteacher, which I feel was really important for them and the students, really creating a link between the key decision-making bodies in the school. My role for the day, as well as running ice-breakers and rounding the day off, was to help the students decide on a strategy for getting the whole-school involved with REGENERATE. For me this always comes down to communication. The best way to start to pique people’s interest is to tell them about what you’re already doing, and encourage them to tell you what they think. Once that’s working, then they’re much more likely to want to move in to taking an active role.
As well as training, the day was used for making some structural decisions and voting in the Chair.
So this is the session I ran with them, and we came up with a really solid communication plan at the end of it. Very importantly each element had someone who would be responsible for it, and a regular date on which it would happen. Some of the ideas that the students came up with and will be taking forward:
Visit primary schools to tell them about REGENERATE, show they will be listened to at The Albion and find out what they want The Albion to be like when they get there.
Use social networking sites to spread the word about what REGENERATE is up to.
Create a REGENERATE jingle for the radio show that they will be recording.
Make sure that the REGENERATE noticeboards are updated after every meeting, that they are in places where everyone in the school will see them and that they are funny and interesting to look at!
I created this short toolkit for the Salford School Council Co-ordinators Network. As with everything we’re doing at involver when we create something we want to give it away for schools to use, play around with and share (that’s why we release everything under a Creative Commons licence). So have a look at this, I think there’s some really useful stuff in there, but it’s not supposed to cover everything, so if there are things you’d like us to add, just drop us an email and we’ll keep expanding it. This is what’s in there now:
Ice breakers (4 school council-related games)
Boundaries and possibilities (2 different types of activity to explore what these might be)
School Councils are the end, not the beginning (presentation – hopefully it makes sense)
(Updated – April 2010) Planning elections
Key lines of communication (a worksheet for planning communication)
School policy on pupil participation (an essential document for any school that’s serious about pupil well-being – this is a guide to creating one)
School council constitution (you can’t really have pupil representation without one – although many try – some scenarios to set you on your way)
Tips for great meetings (guides to help you through preparing for a successful meeting, the meeting itself and ground rules to avoid pitfalls)
All three of these downloads have exactly the same stuff in:
[download id=”2″] 2.4MB You can’t really edit it, but it will look just right with our nice fonts and things.
[download id=”93″]1.3MB Best if you might want to edit things and have a newer version of Word:
[download id=”92″]2.9MB Use this if you want to edit the file and can’t open newer Word files:
