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Newsletter 8: Planning projects, factory schools and student voice good practice

Hello from involver – newsletter number 8

We hope all your chocolate eggs haven’t melted in the sunshine.

Resource: Setting targets and planning a project

These free downloads are something we created for Parliament’s Education Service (PES) to help schools prepare for entering the Speaker’s School Council Award. It’s the second in a series of four sessions to help school councils run projects. The download is in three parts, one at the bottom of this page and the next two on page two:
http://speakersschoolcouncil.org/resources

Video: MPs’ and school councillors’ tips on project planning

We’ve also made these six videos for PES to help schools think about why school councils are important and how to plan and run projects. There are loads of great tips and inspiration for any school council or action team. Watch them all here:
http://involver.org.uk/2011/04/project-planning-and-evaluation-videos-for-school-councils/

Competition: Winner of free half-day of training

Welcome to all our new subscribers who signed up over the last couple of months. The winner of the half-day training is Morgan from Warwickshire, congratulations to them and commiserations to everyone else. Here’s what you could have won:
http://involver.org.uk/school-council-training-and-student-voice-support/

Article: How running your school like a factory can make it more creative

A lot has been said about how schools are too much like factories to be effective, but one school we’ve come across recently is using the ideas of industrialist, W. Edwards Deming to make their school more responsive to student voice. Here are our thoughts:
http://involver.org.uk/2011/04/how-running-a-school-like-a-factory-can-improve-student-voice/

Research: Student voice good practice

We came across the school above as part of the mad rush around the country we’ve been on over the last month to complete research for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) in to good practice in student voice. We’ve seen some exciting and inspiring stuff, and it’s all written up now. We’ll be sure to share it with you as soon as the OCC publish it. See more of the OCC’s work:
http://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/

News: School council chair runs AV debate

Soon Britain will be deciding on whether it wants a new voting system. We think this is a great opportunity for schools to look at how democracy works in their school. This school council has taken up this challenge and is hosting a debate between two local MPs on the Alternative Vote (AV) vs First Past the Post (FPTP):
http://www.getwokingham.co.uk/news/s/2091605_av_debate_at_ranelagh_school
Resources on AV/FPTP to use in your school: http://www.ycsay.co.uk/freeresources.html

Resource: Pilot the Student voice-o-meter

We’ve created a new online tool to help students research student voice in their school, understand who it’s working for and who it’s not. We’re looking for a few schools to pilot it. Let us know if you’re interested by emailing info@involver.org.uk. Find out more here:
http://www.studentvoiceometer.org.uk

Campaign: Every1counts participatory budgeting in schools

We believe that if schools really value student voice they need to involve students in  how the school spends its money, so we’ve teamed up with the Participatory Budgeting Unit and the Citizenship Foundation to support schools to involve the whole school in this process. We are currently seeking funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to enable us to create training and resources. Find out more and sign-up to be considered for the pilot:
http://www.every1counts.org.uk

Hope you have fun over the extra long weekend!

Greg and Asher

P.S. Greg was very keen for us to put in an egg-related joke. I hope you’ll agree that I showed eggscelent taste in resisting the temptation to do so.

http://twitter.com/doingdemocracy
http://facebook.com/involver.org.uk

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Project planning and evaluation videos for school councils

We helped make this series of six videos for Parliament’s Education Service. As well as encouraging schools to enter the Speaker’s School Council Award they contain loads of great tips from MPs and school councillors of all ages on how to make any project a success.

If your school council or project team is getting a bit stuck have a watch of some of these, they might just give you a few ideas.

Why enter the Speaker’s School Council Award

Getting ideas and choosing a project

Planning your project

Keeping your team on track

Keeping people informed and involved

Evaluating your project

These videos were all shot, directed and edited by the fantastic Kwame Lestrade of Franklyn Lane Films.

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Putting ideas in to action

It’s great when someone gets in touch to tell you that they’ve tried an idea you’ve thrown out into the internet (and that it’s working!).

I got this email and photo today:

Hi Asher,

I hope this email finds you well.

As you know, we didn’t have a student council notice board but having found the idea for a progress board on the Involver website, the students wanted one. So I just wanted to say thank you and I’ve attached a photo of our own 2.5 metre by 1.5 metre version. It’s certainly sparking some interesting conversation.

Many thanks,

Zoe

Lodge Park Technology College

School council progress board at Lodge Park Technology College
The school council progress board in use at Lodge Park Technology College

Also very impressed that the project second from bottom is their entry into the Speaker’s School Council Award – something we help Parliament to run. It should be on all of your boards too ;)

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How can you encourage more people to get involved in your Student Voice?

This is a question that I am sure many schools struggle with, and I’d be lying if I said Little Heath hadn’t faced this problem over the years as well. The answer to this question can be the key to success in student voice.

It might be that the attendance at your school council is dwindling, or the uptake for your new peer mentoring scheme is low, or maybe you are struggling to keep your student voice “cool”. I don’t claim to have a definitive answer but I hope to offer some practical advice that you may find useful.

Publicise it! Ensure that the students know what is going on, what your plans are and how they can be involved. Go into assemblies once every half term, produce a mini newsletter, create posters and display boards around school, go into their tutor times, send letters home. You name it, it’s possible. But most crucially get out and speak to them. Chat with them about what student voice is, what activities are available, get them to share their thoughts with you, get their advice.

Be inclusive. Don’t hand pick the good students or reject the more challenging ones when they volunteer. Each one has something to offer. It is important to go out to your students as well as expecting them to come to you. At Little Heath, our Student Voice Leaders (a small group of senior students who each take a lead on an area of Student Voice) regularly go into tutor groups to chat informally to students about their lessons and other areas of school life, but also to share with them what is going on in the student voice world.

One of the greatest, and most effective, outcomes of student voice is that students feel valued. Ensure that everyone knows that your school council, for example, is there, not just because you have to have one but because you want to hear what your students have to say. Show them that their work has impact, that it makes a difference and that it can be rewarding. This gives students a sense of ownership and that their school council is their school council.

Informal structure as well as formal structure can work. Elections are great but don’t always work for everyone. Having an informal place where suggestions can be made and students can show an interest is also really helpful. This can either be a place that allows students to drop in and share ideas with you or it might even be a suggestion box that is checked regularly.

These are just a few ideas but I hope that in some way they are helpful to you.

Alison,
Student Voice Coordinator
Little Heath School

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Making a great student voice conference even better – part 2

This is part two of a blog on Little Heath’s Student Voice conference. You can read the first part here. This concentrated on the older students who were organising the conference, and the adults that supported them.

This second part will look at the experience of some of the younger pupils who are more recently involved with student voice. Let’s focus on student voice in learning since it’s one of the areas that the school does amazingly well. This centres around the STARs project – Students as Researchers.

The STARs (students as researchers) project is a key part of student voice in Little Heath. It’s designed to give the students an influence in their learning and school-life. Importantly, this isn’t based on whim, but research. Even more importantly, this research is student-led.

This first group looked at the types of homework that students liked most. Lots of students were complaining about their homework so they worked on a questionnaire to send out to pupils. The results were presented to Governors and SLT.

Here’s two year 9 students telling us about their STARs project. As opposed to the first group, this project focuses on classroom teaching. It looks at specific subjects: English, History and ICT in years 7 and 8. A crucial area to look at, and some very useful findings:

This group looked at the help that is available for students within the school. Here’s a member of the group talking us through the teacher questionnaire that they organised, and what will happen to their ideas:

Members of the STARs team can get involved year after year. These two members led a successful project last year, and are doing a first plan for their anti-bullying project this year:

Lots of the learning from the STARs project goes into a booklet which is given out to the school to publicise their work. Here’s the team in charge of making it:

Ongoing reflections on Homework:

Year 7 pupils (I think) talking us through their planner/homework diary/timetable.

They’re encouraged to reflect on what they’ve learnt and their homework, if there was too much or if they really enjoyed it. Teachers would then look at this. It’s a simple but good way to encourage reflection on learning and start a conversation with teachers.

Student voice in school planning:

Year 7 pupils on the Buildings and Environment group looking at how to improve this aspect of their school. They’re starting point is how they would make their school into the ‘dream school’ and they’re drawing a big map. They’re clearly getting a lot from approaching this in a visual way.

Key quote ‘it makes it come to life’

So that’s a taster of some of the great work being worked on by the younger pupils at Little Heath. The range of student voice work is really amazing, and if you’re interested, take a look at my original post from last year’s conference for a bit of analysis into why it works so well.

Well done to everyone involved :)

Greg

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Using student voice in lessons, a couple of ideas

My fiancée, Chloe, told me about a couple of ways she’d used sudent voice in her classes today (she’s Head of Drama at a London secondary), so I asked her to write them down for your enjoyment.

Asher

I’ve tried out a couple of little ideas for increasing the student voice in my classroom recently, neither took any extra effort on my part, but I think both have increased the engagement of students in their own learning.

  • The first was to offer students the choice of how long they should get on the task, we set this by popular vote. They had either 3, 5 or 7 minutes to do the task. The group chose 7 but when they performed the pieces they were not as good as they or I had expected. So we discussed this and how if they have longer shouldn’t it mean the piece is better? We learnt together that they work better under more pressure and so when given the choice in the next lesson they chose the middle option.
  • I was a bit stuck as to what to set Year 9 for homework so asked them to talk to the person next to them about what written homework they thought they’d like to do. Some suggestions were quite similar and so we ended up with three choices, they took a vote as a class. Thinking about it I wonder if they could have chosen to do the one they wanted from the list. It certainly makes for more varied and interesting marking. Most of them looked more keen than usual writing it in to their planners; hopefully they’ll put more in to it too, I’ll find out next week when it’s due in.