Tag: democracy

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School council welcome pack – helping new school councillors

As you might expect, as someone really interested in education, schools and community I’m a school governor. One of the things I’m doing in that role currently is thinking about how we make new governors feel supported and able to play a constructive role as soon as possible. So I’ve started re-writing our governor induction pack – this is basically a welcome pack for new governors. It’s lead me on to thinking about not just what information we give to new governors, but what mentoring and training we need to give them and what we need them to do to make the most of it.

How to be a SMART school councillor
You need to create a guide for your school on how new school councillors can do a great job representing their peers and making things happen. You might want to include one of these for some ideas on your roles, collecting ideas and running meetings. Please excuse the shameless plug ;)

It occurred to me that new school councillors could do with a similar sort of pack and that getting current school councillors to write it would be really useful to get your new school council off to a flying start next year.

Below is the process we are going through and how I think it could work for a school council.

  1. Get together a small group of current school councillors – ideally some who have been on the council for a while and some who are new.
  2. Write down a list of all the things you wish you had known when you became a school councillor.
  3. Write down a list of all the support that you have found useful in your role as a school councillor.
  4. Add in any support that you would have liked but didn’t receive.
  5. Write a short document (no more than a page) that will be the cover of your induction pack. This should tell new school councillors what support they will get and list all the useful information that you will put in the welcome pack. We have organised under these headings, they might work for you too:
    • What we’ll do to support you (the new school councillor)
    • What we need you to do
    • The documents attached (that will help you to understand your role and how our school and school council works)
    • Useful websites (or other sources of information)
  6. Now you’ve got to collect all that information together and work out whatever training, mentoring, etc. you have said you will provide.

Do you already have a school council welcome pack? What is in it or what would you put in it if you had one?

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Citizenship involver blog News

Citizenship stays but it needs to be active

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.

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involver blog

How you can help teach about participatory budgeting

[iframe http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/apprendre-a-compter/widget/ 232 330]

As regular readers of our website will know, we think participatory budgeting is a fantastic way to get your whole school involved in pupil voice. Loads of schools do it already through getting the whole school involved in deciding on new playground equipment or how a new building should be fitted out, but coming up with a good structure for it can transform student voice in your school.

This guy wants the chance to help schools across Europe learn about good ways to run participatory budgeting, but he needs your help. He’s asking for small donations (even just a couple of pounds) to fund the making and distribution of this series of interactive videos.

Watch the video he’s made explaining the idea and if you can pledge some money, please do (I have already).

If you can’t see the information about the project to the left, click this link to see the video, read more and pledge: http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/apprendre-a-compter

 

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involver blog Resources

Tips for chairing meetings

A tipped chair
A different kind of chair and a different kind of tip, but you see what I’m getting at.

I’m currently mentoring the co-chairs of Haringey Youth Council and I came up with this list of tips for them, which I thought others might find useful.

What are your tips for making meetings run smoothly and involving everyone? Add them in the comments below.

Before the meeting

If at all possible make sure information goes out before the meeting, so you can spend the meeting discussing and making decisions, not listening to presentations.

Have timings for each item on the agenda. This will mean you can get through the whole thing as everyone knows when they need to draw the discussion to a close (or when you’re going to force them to).

Set up the room so that everyone can see one another and you can see everyone. There’s nothing more annoying than wanting to speak in a meeting but not being seen.

When any new people or visitors come to the meeting introduce yourself and welcome them.

In the meeting

Sit next to the person taking the minutes so you can check that you’re both keeping up.

When you want people to move to a decision, summarise what the decision is: don’t try to summarise the whole discussion.

Write up options and decisions so that everyone can see them. This helps avoid confusion and repetition.

When people put their hand up to speak, give them a nod and write their name on a list. This way they can put their hand down and concentrate on the discussion knowing they won’t be forgotten.

Add your name to the list when you want to speak, this will stop you jumping in.

If it’s important to the discussion that you hear from everyone, make sure you go round the whole group and specifically ask everyone for an opinion.

When people give opinions, ask them to explain their reasoning. This will move the debate forward.

Meetings should be about action – what you are going to do – so try to move the discussion into the future tense. Discussions in the past tense tend to be about blame, present tense tends to be about opinions, but future tense tends to be about action. It’s easier to find consensus over the what to do in the future than who to blame for what happened in the past.

If you think everyone agrees with an idea, check by asking if anyone wants to speak against it. If no one does, then you are safe to assume everyone agrees.

Be aware of jargon or ideas that people new to the meeting might not understand. You can either explain them or ask the person speaking to briefly explain the term for new members, guests, etc.

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involver blog

Involver Internship

By way of an introduction, my name is Cameron and I recently graduated from a Journalism & Media BA. I am very lucky to have been given the opportunity to work with Asher and Greg here at Involver while developing the new Smart School Councils site, so you can
expect to read more from me over the coming weeks.

From my own experience at school, college and university, it has become apparent that the student voice is an important aspect of any educational institution that is too often neglected. When there are channels in place for students to have an input into how their school works, it seems that there is usually no real power to make a change put into their hands. This often leaves student councils and other democratic processes to the few students who have developed a passion for the political and the confidence to challenge their teachers, leaving the majority of students who have their own concerns and ideas without any real ability to be heard.

At Involver, we aim to work with students and teachers to put in place the resources and training necessary to give everyone the chance to get involved helping to improve their school. This helps schools develop a community spirit and collaborative ethos for the benefit of staff and pupils alike, while also teaching young people about responsibility and democracy to prepare them for life after education.

It’s an ideology I am proud to support, and I look forward to contributing to and learning from the Involver team while we produce content for the Smart School Council site. I’m also hoping to hear from students and teachers who are interested in what we do here or have their own ideas about democracy in schools, so please feel free to email or get in touch on the forums.

We are happy to answer any questions you may have about what we do and why we do it.

 

Cameron Scott Doherty.

Email: info@involver.org.uk ¦ Portfolio: www.csdoherty.wordpress.com

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involver blog

Fantastic school council meeting in Krnov

The noticeboard at the front entrance, showing what the school council is working on and what it has achieved.

Our first stop, at Krnov School, was a real treat. The first thing we saw when we came through the front door was a ‘School Parliament’ (school council) noticeboard laying out what the Parliament is working on now and what it has done recently. As we explored later we saw there were two more noticeboards for the Parliament, one outside the headteacher’s office and the other outside the music room where they meet. The locations of the these boards makes a clear statement about the status of the Parliament in the school. They have named their school council ‘Heart of the School’, which has the same connotations in Czech as it does in English.

The school council meeting we got to see was for the upper school (students aged 11-15). The school has students from age 6-15 and they split their school council in two, one for the lower school and one for the upper school. The meeting we saw was really impressive: decisions were made, action was decided upon and fun was had. I’ll try to give you a sense of what this looked like and how it was achieved.

The upper school council with their logo in the background.

The council arrived and seated themselves in a circle sitting on drums/stools students had decorated. One of the older students ran through each of the classes to check that all the representatives were there.

The chair, another of the older students, checked up that the actions agreed at the last meeting had been completed and they moved on to the first discussion. This was about taking photos of the school council to display in the school and use on a Christmas card. After listening to a few points of view it was clear that there was general agreement so the chair moved to a vote. This was carried and the chair asked for a volunteer to ensure that the action was carried out.

All of the above happened in the first two minutes of the meeting. It seemed very informal, but incredibly effective. We were told by the students that the meeting was pretty typical and later by their teachers that these students are a fair cross-section of the school in terms of academic ability and interests. I’m still trying to work out what enabled them to work so well together.

Working in small teams with mixed ages.

After discussions about the school council website, plans for the play space outside the school the meeting came to a discussion about a new rewards system. At this point the school council co-ordinator, who had so far taken a back seat, took over. She split the meeting into mixed groups fo 4 or five and asked each group to come up with five ideas for why people should be rewarded by the school council. After a few minutes of discussion she paired up groups and asked them to get their two sets of five ideas down to five between them. The groups then announced their ideas and the chair wrote them up on the whiteboard, omitting any duplicates. Whilst this was happening the teacher handed each school councillor three stickers. They were to use these to vote between the options on the whiteboard. In this way a complex decision was taking democratically and quickly.

Voting on options

After this the teacher reminded the students of a game they had played at the previous few meetings. She told them they had ten minutes to plan how to complete it this time – they’d failed on their previous attempts. When the ten minutes was up – and the students had failed again – the teacher got them to reflect on their planning and the way they had worked together. They came up with some useful ideas which she helped them apply to their school council. The student’s comment that I liked the most was, “we did discuss it and made a plan, but we all just talked to our friends, we didn’t make a plan all together.”

The aim of the game was to get people from being in age order to alphabetical order without any of them stepping outside the lines.

It was clear that although they weren’t successful at completing the challenge those kinds of discussions and games had a real impact on how they were able to work together as a school council. It was a real honour to see them work.