Tag: effective

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Participatory budgeting – the essence of student voice?

What’s your school’s ethos?

Most of the schools I meet use terms like ‘community’, ‘the school as a family’, ‘listening to and valuing all pupils’ and ’empowering learners’.

  • So how do you prove the ethos of your school?
  • Can you measure your school’s ethos?

Now those are a couple of tricky questions (not least grammatically). The answers I usually see are:

  • You could write it above the entrance as a motto/vision/mission statement.
  • Do a survey to feel if people feel ‘listened to/safe/happy/enlightened/self-actualised’ (okay, I haven’t actually heard either of the last two).
Participatory Budgeting toolkit by PB Unit
Participatory Budgeting toolkit by PB Unit

Yesterday Greg and I spent a fascinating few hours discussing something far more tangible, empowering and effective: participatory budgeting (now there’s a name to get the pulse racing!). We were at a meeting convened by the Participatory Budgeting Unit, Citizenship Foundation and ourselves and attended by several other organisations with a range of interests and experiences in the field.

The idea of participatory budgeting, as I see it, is simple:

You involve the people whose money is being spent in the decisions about how that money is spent. (Wikipedia goes into more detail, naturally)

So how does this relate to school ethos? Well, if you say you’re a school that listens to your pupils, how about listening to them on a proportion of your budget? Set a percentage, set some boundaries and a structure, listen and then act (even better, help them to act).

Like it or not money is essential to how a school works. If you really want to involve your whole school community in decision-making then that’s going to involve how money is spent. Make a statement. Involve the whole school in he process and let them see the outcomes.

This also gives you a yardstick by which to measure how you are progressing. The more trust grows between staff, students and governors; the more students learn about how the school runs; the more responsible they show themselves to be: the larger the percentage of the budget is that they help control.

Over the coming months we (the meeting organisers) intend to help produce tools and guidance to assist schools in involving all pupils in ‘PB’.

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Pupil interview panels – getting it right

Over the last couple of days a motion being discussed at the NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers) to strike over increasing student voice has sparked a number of alarmist articles across the press. (Click here for our formal response).

Essentially they pull out a few examples of bad or questionable practice of involving pupils in the interview process and from there draw the conclusion that pupils shouldn’t be listened to. So the NASUWT has found a few examples of where schools appear to have managed the process badly and so  want to ban the process completely.  I’m suggesting a different approach: get schools to manage the process well.

I’ve worked in many schools where they’ve found the process invaluable because pupils give them a different perspective on the candidates. Most of them use a process something like this:

  1. Governors decide on your interview process, how the day will be run and what role pupils will play in this (bearing in mind that any decision of who to employ is ultimately down to the governors).
  2. Write down the process and responsibilities and share with all involved, including pupils and prospective candidates (i.e. put it in the application pack).
  3. Get together a representative group of pupils, explain the process to them, including how much weight their views will be given. This maybe your school council or a group s/elected for this purpose, but here we’ll assume it’s the school council.
  4. Get the school council members to go to other classes in the school (how many depends on the role being applied for, for a Head you may want them to go to all classes):
    1. Discuss,  ‘what makes a good Head/Deputy/Teacher/etc.?’
    2. Each class should decide on the top 3 qualities/skills.
    3. These should be recorded by the school council representative.
  5. The school council should be given training on:
    1. Confidentiality
    2. Active listening
    3. Open v. Closed questions
    4. Leading questions
    5. Questions candidates might ask
  6. The school council then discusses:
    1. What the other pupils have said makes a good Head/Deputy/Teacher/etc.?
    2. They choose the most important of these.
    3. What questions would you ask to find out if someone had each of these?
    4. What sort of answers would be good or bad?
  7. This list of questions is then drawn up along with a marking sheet for each of the questions/qualities.
  8. Setting up the pupil panel:
    1. The pupil panel is separate to the adult panel (ideally there should be no other adults in the room, where safeguarding good practice allows).
    2. One student is nominated as the chair.
    3. The pupil panel is not a ‘weeding out’ stage.
    4. Candidates are encouraged to ask the pupil panel questions to ensure this is a two-way process.
  9. As in formal interviews each candidate is asked the same set of questions. Each member of the pupil panel writes comments and marks on their marking sheet. After each candidate has left pupils discuss them and come to a joint conclusion. These are written down and passed to the adult interview panel.
  10. The pupil panel meets with the adult interview panel so the adult panel can ask for clarification or explanation of the pupil panel’s findings.
  11. The adult interview panel makes the decision on who to appoint. Giving whatever weight to the pupil’s views they feel it merits. If they wish to they can question the pupil panel on how they arrived at their decision.
  12. The application process is evaluated so that it can be improved for next time:
    1. Discussion with school council about how it went: did they ask the right types of questions; did they get the kinds of answers they were expecting, etc.?
    2. Where possible, discussion with candidates about how they felt about the process.

The benefits you’ll get from involving pupils in the interview process:

  • A wider variety of perspectives on candidates.
  • Candidates get a different view on the school.
  • Pupils learn something about what makes a good teacher (and how hard it is to be one).
  • You might learn something about what pupils value in a good teacher (I’ve never once seen the answer, ‘a pushover’).
  • Pupils learn about how interviews work, useful knowledge when entering the work force.
  • A good starting point for relationships between pupils and a new teacher.
  • It says that your school has pupils as its focus and that’s what you expect of your staff too.

And here are a few other people’s views on the benefits of pupils’ involvement in the interview process:

From staff and pupils: BBC News

From another governor (I mean other than me): Jaynehowarth’s Weblog

From Headteachers and another teaching union: ASCL (Association of School and College Leaders)

So, please don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, just improve the processes and training around involving pupils.

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I’d like to thank my mum, God and all the little people

Greg making his acceptance speech
What I imagine Greg's acceptance speech will look like. I hope he doesn't cry.

I’m a little bit excited today, well actually I have been all week, because tomorrow we’re off to a very swanky awards ceremony at the Hilton in Park Lane, where Greg has won an award!

So, we’ve both bought our outfits and arranged a very select group of colleagues and friends to join us (sorry if you didn’t get an invitation!). In facts it’s rather got in the way of us actually doing anything productive, which is a bit ironic as that’s what Greg’s getting this award for: the huge strides he’s made since setting up involver.

It’s made us think a bit about what we have managed to achieve over the last few months and realise that actually it’s quite impressive. From both of us being on the dole 6 months ago, we’ve managed to do all this:

– Completed research for DCSF and SSAT

– Presented at an international student voice conference in Slovakia

– Written a CPD module for ACT on student voice and Citizenship

– Set up a national school council awards scheme for Parliament

– Created and and ran a training course for school council trainers from the Czech Republic

– Run loads of training courses for school students and school council co-ordinators including for ASCL and NCSL

– Worked with LAs from across the country to support their training, including Tower Hamlets, Wolverhampton and Salford

– Written new resources for schools on how to improve school councils

– Started to set up partnerships with Changemakers, Centre for Democratic Education, Citizenship Foundation and User Voice

So that’s why Greg’s getting the Square Mile 30under30 London Talent Award.  Which I think is a pretty good set of reasons.

But Greg could be up for a special category award too, so please do wish him luck and have us in your thoughts as you’re at work and we’re being wined and dined at one of London’s fanciest hotels ;)

Square Mile 30 under 30 invitation
This is what Greg's won
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Ashley School – using school councils to teach Citizenship

Ashley School Council's great slogan
Ashley School Council's great slogan

Yesterday Greg and I went to Ashley School in Widnes to do some testing for a big project we’re doing with the Parliament Education Service (PES).

It’s such a great school to visit because they really seem to get the links between the school council, Citizenship and the happiness of everyone in the school.

How do they do this:

  • Ensure everyone who wants to participate can. There are elected councils but also groups people can volunteer for.
  • There are groups that reflect a variety of interests to engage different students, to name just a few: Sports, Eco, Anne Frank (community and human rights).
  • All staff take responsibility and get involved with groups and committees that interest them: the PE teacher runs the Sports Committee, the Science teacher runs the Eco group, etc.
  • The school council is structured with a purpose, they decided to reflect the Houses of Parliament and use this as a teaching tool to help students understand the wider political system.
  • Pride of place is given to the pupils’ various councils and groups. They have their own committee room and displays in the reception area.
  • The school council is designed to be completely inclusive. Although there are no pupils with physical disabilities as Ashley School their committee room is designed to be accessible and usable by all, it includes a whole range of assistive technologies. There is even a CCTV system to meetings can be viewed all over the school.

Anyway, here’s a little video of their council chamber. Obviously we couldn’t get the kids in because of child safety issues, but you get the idea.

This is no new thing to Ashley School, they’ve been doing this work for years as this great article in the Guardian testifies: Friends, pupils, citizens

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Raising achievement through student voice and data

I just read this really interesting article on how schools in Colorado are finding that in the quest to raise standards and achievement that data alone is a blunt tool; student voice sharpens this.

Their recommendations are excellent, especially:

Utilize student-led outreach to capture feedback from disengaged students.

Have a read: http://blog.ednewscolorado.org/2010/01/05/in-r2t-student-voice-will-sharpen-blunt-instruments/

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A short toolkit for school council co-ordinators

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: