active – Involver

The enthusiasm of the students was fantastic.

One of the problems of school councils is that they’re exclusive, they inherently narrow down the number of people who can get involved. For a structure that’s there to give everyone a voice, that seems like the wrong way to go. On the other hand, having 100 people in a room, let alone 1,000, can make it pretty difficult to get anything done.

So when we were asked to work with Northampton Academy who have over 70 students on their school council we were eager to see how we could make it work. After a bit of head scratching as to how we would approach it I remembered a method for collective action that I’d read about: Open Space.

Open Space reflected a lot of what we already suggest to school councils:

Break down into small groups.
Work on projects you care about.
If no one cares enough to work on it, it’s probably not really important, move on to something else.

We discussed this with the senior team at Northampton Academy and we agreed to give it a go. We were all excited but equally nervous about how it would work out; it being such a departure from our normal structured training sessions, and the even more structured school days that students are used to.

After a couple of short icebreakers everyone took their seats in the large circle and we explained how the day would work:

We know they are all here because they want to help make the Academy outstanding.
It’s up to them to decide what they want to do to work towards that goal.
Anyone who wants to can suggest an idea, if they are willing to help run a group to make it happen.
Anyone can join or leave any group at any time during the day.
In fact, the one rule is: Wherever you are neither contributing or learning, move to somewhere where you are.

I lay the ideas sheets and some pens in the middle of the circle and waited, half expecting no one to come forward. Immediately twenty students ran to the middle and started scribbling down their ideas. Each of them confirmed that they wanted to put in some work to make their ideas happen. Our fears had been completely unwarranted.

A group practice their pitch to the headteacher and the rest of the school council.

There were so many ideas, each with an eager proponent that we quickly had to move into the next phase of asking them to find other people to work with them on their idea. At this stage we only let ideas with at least 3 supporters get going. The first 10 groups were each given a space to work, some resources and the support of a Y12 or Y13 student leader that we had trained the day before.

All of the groups worked with fantastic enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and purpose, so by the end of the day we had presentations from 15 different projects. Every member of the 70+ strong school council had a task she or he was going to complete, each of which was part of a larger project plan.

This was achieved by us just throwing the school open to the students and trusting them to improve it in ways that meant something to them. Through the Y12 and Y13 school council we provided them with peer mentoring. This helped them to think through the details of their projects, without adult interference.

Of course the final effectiveness of this will be judged over the coming weeks – do the students stick to their plans – but we were amazed by what they achieved in the day. We are eager to see how we can use this model with other schools to engage a much larger group of students than are normally active in a school council.

The hall was a hive of activity with students working on projects and canvassing support.

The Associate Principal studies the range of projects the students want to work on.

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.