ethos – Involver

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

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’.

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:

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).
Write down the process and responsibilities and share with all involved, including pupils and prospective candidates (i.e. put it in the application pack).
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.
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.
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
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?
This list of questions is then drawn up along with a marking sheet for each of the questions/qualities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.