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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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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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A personal explanation of a Czech school council

Our installment today comes from Dobronin village school. It is yet another great school council experience for us with a school council that is clearly working very well. I think the influence of CEDU and the process they have been through with the schools is evident. They have taken all of these schools on residentials and worked with them on problem-solving, negotation and teamwork and it really shows. I would love involver to be able to run something similar for schools in the UK.

Rather than me explaining Dobronin school council to you, this time we have this poster made by last year’s school council so they can do it in their own words.

You can read more about their School Parliament on their website, including a list of their achievements and photos from their residential event.

After the meeting the teachers from the other schools commented on how little the teachers from Dobronin had said in the meeting and how they had put their hands up to speak and waited to be asked like the students. The teachers from Dobronin felt this was very important as it stopped the students always looking to them for answers. We then had a very interesting discussion on how careful teachers have to be to not unduly influence the opinion of the school council. A school council coordinator pointed out that this can be an even bigger problem in class meetings. So how do you ensure that the teacher does not sway the opinions being aired?

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Great ideas from Brno for effective school council meetings

School council meeting in Brno
The screen at the top of the photo was used to display images of the topics being discussed when appropriate, the rest of the time the minutes were displayed there as they were typed up.

Today we’re sitting in Masarova School in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second city. Again we’ve been lucky to witness an excellent school council meeting, albeit one that was very different to the one we saw yesterday.

This meeting was more formal, not least in the room layout,but there was still a good deal of respect and understanding between the pupils. Again, the range of issues they covered was impressive and would ring bells for UK school councils: communication with the whole school, school dinners, fundraising, the school council’s budget and how to get more teachers involved with the school council.

There were a few things that stood out to us as useful ideas that other school councils could use:

Have the minutes displayed as they are being typed. This allows everyone to see that they are being recorded accurately and see that an action plan has been agreed – if you use action-focused minutes.

The three chairpeople
The three chairpeople supported one another well and ensured that virtually everyone (22 out of 24 school councillors) contributed during the meeting.

Have people in supporting roles. There were three chairs and two secretaries. One person took the lead as each but the others helped out and ensured that everyone was seen and all notes were taken down.

Don’t just choose the oldest students to chair. In this school the three chairs seemed to be some of the youngest people in the meeting, but they were enthusiastic and did an excellent job of moving the discussions along.

Have large name badges for everyone in the room. All teachers and students had these and it meant the secretaries could easily record who was doing what.

Print out the minutes at the end of the meeting to give to everyone so they know what was discussed and what their action points are.

The two secretaries
The two secretaries typed up the minutes as the meeting was going and they were projected on to a screen that everyone could see. At the end of the meeting they printed out the minutes for all the school councillors.
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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.

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Getting class council meetings to work

Involving the whole school

The key issue for school councils is how they involve the whole student body. Not just once a year when representatives are voted on, but on an on-going basis, throughout the year.

For me the core of the answer is in class meetings. Through these every student in the school can be listened to, given a chance to speak and become involved. Not all will want to, and many won’t very often, but the fact that it happens regularly, for everyone makes a huge difference. It is clear that the school (and the school council) are there for you when you need it, and is actively trying to involve you.

Transferring responsibility in secondaries

In secondary schools having these meetings is often seen to be harder than in primaries. The timetable is more prescribed, students move around and swap groups during the day, and so on. Last week when this issue arose at a training session I asked about the class meetings in the teacher’s school. He said that they had got rid of them because they couldn’t rely on the 72 form tutors to run them and pass on the messages. I’ve heard this from so many schools and it makes me sad to think about what this says to the students about how much their form tutors value their opinions. It raises questions of management too, but we’ll leave that to another time.

To me it seems that this is a problem that could be avoided. This shouldn’t be the teachers’ responsibility, it should be the class reps’.  They should each have a simple page to assist them to run a class meeting. It lists decisions made, questions to be asked and a space for raising new issues. This makes sure that every class in the school is involved in the discussions of the school council. All the teacher needs to do is ensure that every other Friday 15 minutes of form time is given over to the class rep (as stated in the school council policy).

So I suggested this to the delegates at the training event. They liked the idea and of course asked whether I had a template for this. “Of course,” I white-lied, “I’ll send it out to you all next week.” So this morning I transferred that template from my head to the computer.

Free template

You can download a PDF or a Word version below. There are instructions for the class rep on the sheet itself. Instructions on how to fill it out are at the bottom of this page.

[gview file=”http://involver.org.uk/dl/class-meeting-feedback-form.pdf” save=”0″]

[download id=”250″]

[download id=”251″]

Instructions for filling it out

I would suggest you take the Word version and then you can type directly in to it. This is how it needs to be filled out (I say ‘school council’ below but it could be any meeting that is being reported back from, such as a year or house council):

  1. In Section 1 you should put the decisions that were taken at the school council. Keep it succinct but clear, as the rep will just read this section out.
  2. You should just be able to copy the ‘Issue’ from your minutes.
  3. The ‘Action/Decision’ should also be from your minutes, so wherever possible it should be an action: WHO is going to do WHAT by WHEN.
  4. The ‘Reason’ is where you can add some explanation. For example, ‘There was general agreement on this from across the school’; ‘There isn’t the money to do this at this time’
  5. In Section 2 you should write the question that the school council wants to ask the whole school. Make the question clear and simple, so you are sure everyone across the school understands it as written.
  6. Depending on the question, you may find it useful to add some options for classes to select from.
  7. You should leave section 3 blank, this is where ideas from the classes are written down.

You then need a system for collecting and collating these sheets. It could be that they are all handed in to the office straight after form time to be collected by the school council secretary later.