For the last few months, we’ve been working on an exciting new student voice/school council tool called the Student Voice-o-Meter. We’ve worked closely with two very talented people, Robert Johnson doing the amazing illustration, and Derek Winton pulling all the database and code stuff together. We’re extremely grateful for their help, ideas and talent in making the voice-o-meter come alive.
Put simply, it’s a student-led tool that helps schools to look at what’s good and bad about student voice or their school council. And how it can be improved. Here’s a wee preview:
The Student Voice-o-Meter is very young at the moment, and needs to work with some friendly schools to help him to grow. It’s really hungry and would love some data from your school.
That means we’re looking for three or four schools to give it a trial, get some support from us, and tell us what they think. When it’s up and running, we’ll give those schools free access to the tool. Forever.
So if you’re a teacher or a student, we’d love to hear from you.
Welcome to all our new friends and we hope all our old ones are keeping well.
Resource: 5 Tutor time activities to prepare for an election
This is a series of short activities to help get the whole school up to speed for an election. They’ll introduce key concepts about what democracy is, what the school council is for and why people should stand. As well as clear instructions, there are PowerPoints and handouts to enable every form tutor in the school to run them. Have a look: http://involver.org.uk/2011/03/school-council-election-tutor-form-time-activities/
Campaign: Keep Citizenship strong
As I’m sure you’re aware there’s a curriculum review going on. This means both that there’s a threat to Citizenship in the secondary curriculum and an opportunity to strengthen it in the primary curriculum. We need you to add your voice, sign up to www.democraticlife.org.uk, but most importantly respond to the review formally. There is some advice here: http://www.democraticlife.org.uk/curriculum-review/
Articles: The life of a gap-year student voice assistant
If you’re interested in finding out about what an Amnesty Youth Group could do for your school, there’s training in Manchester on the 21st of May. www.amnesty.org.uk/teachertraining
Research: Student voice good practice
We’ve been commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (they know about commissioning) to collect good practice on student voice from across England. It’s great fun, but we’re having to work our socks off to get it done within the timeframe. We’ve been seeing some amazing things so far, and we’re sure there’s more to come. If you follow us on Twitter we’ll keep you informed of the best little things we see: http://twitter.com/doingdemocracy
Resource: Coming up with ideas (for the Speaker’s School Council Award)
The Speaker’s School Council Award is a great scheme to celebrate what you’ve been doing with your school council. If you’re not quite sure what project you should enter, we’re creating a series of resources for Parliament to help you create a project, carry it out, keep people informed and evaluate it. The first one is here: http://speakersschoolcouncil.org/resources
"You should move that bloomin' great big box", "No, you should", "They should", "Or her"
I wrote these tutor/form time activities a while ago for a school I was working with in Coventry, not sure why I haven’t posted them until now. Often elections are just sprung upon a school without any preparation. No one thinks to explain to the whole school why they should choose to stand, or how they should choose who to vote for. What this ends up with is the same people (and the same kind of people) getting elected every year.
Each one of these short sessions leads people towards an understanding of why they should stand to be a representative, or what they should consider when they are voting.
Download the whole lot here [download id=”229″] or read more …
There are 5 sessions plus the election itself. They are all participative sessions, but the resources should enable any teacher to feel confident facilitating the sessions.:
A) What is democracy?
There’s more to democracy than just voting, it’s an ongoing process. It’s not about others making decision for you, it’s about you being involved in the decision.
[download id=”230″]
B) What is a School Council?
The kinds of things the School Council might deal with.
[download id=”231″]
C) How does the School Council communicate with the whole school?
Explain the structures of the decision-making and the School Council in our school. Explain about recall. Explain structure of form/tutor groups to Year/House council to School Council. and frequency of meetings.
[download id=”232″]
D) What is a representative?
What qualities are needed by a representative?
[download id=”233″]
E) How do our elections work?
The processes for nominating, standing and voting are explained. Explain terminology of closed ballot, etc. Explain that the whole year/house will be electing year/house reps to School Council from the reps who are elected as form/tutor reps.
[download id=”234″]
The eventual voting process is ‘blind’, by which I mean people vote for a manifesto, rather than voting for a person. The school this was written for originally choose to run their election in this way to avoid it being a popularity contest and instead base it on policies and ideas.
[download id=”235″] (PDF) or [download id=”236″] (Word)
Practicalities
You can run any of the sessions on their own, but I think they probably work best as a series.
They’re each 15 minutes long, but could usefully stretch if you had the time.
It says they are for ‘vertical’ tutor groups of about 20, but they should work just as well with larger groups and groups based on age.
Files
You can download all 5 activities (including instructions and all resources) here: [download id=”229″]
Or you can download them individually if you want:
[download id=”230″]
[download id=”231″]
[download id=”232″]
[download id=”233″]
[download id=”234″]
[download id=”235″] (PDF) or [download id=”236″] (Word)
Each download is a zip file containing:
Instructions (in Word and PDF format)
An (animated) PowerPoint slideshow illustrating the key points
PDFs Posters of the essential bits of the slideshow for those who don’t have a projector/IWB
Any worksheets (in Word and PDF format)
If you can’t download zip files and need the files separately send me an email and I’ll get them over to you: asher@involver.org.uk
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
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 ;)
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
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.
