Very often there’s just one member of staff in each school with responsibility for student voice and the school council (ideally it should be part of everyone’s role) so it can feel like you’re a bit unsupported. We’d like to set up some regular free events around London to get school council co-ordinators together to share ideas, resources (and tales of woe).
It’ll be something informal, Teachmeet-style, where we’d like to hear from anyone who is doing anything interesting in their school, or who is facing a particular challenge. We’ll be on hand to offer a school council surgery and we’ll see how it develops.
If you think you might be interested, fill out the form below:
These are a few ideas for how you can run discussions in your school or class council meetings. In fact you could use them in any meeting really.
Method
Good for
Be aware of
Yes/No/Maybe – designate a different area of the room for each answer. Ask the question and get people to stand in the area that represents their answer. Ask people to explain their reasoning and persuade others.
A more sophisticated version is an ‘opinion line’ where participants place themselves along a line to show how strongly they agree/disagree with something.
A further level of sophistication is to make a graph with 2 axes (e.g. difficulty vs importance or agree vs care).
Getting people out of their seats.
Pushing people to explain their reasoning.
Getting different people talking.
Being a physical demonstration of changing opinion and persuasion.
Peer pressure: people not wanting to stand on their own. You can often avoid this by starting with trivial questions and supporting and praising those who do stand on their own.
Passing the ‘conch’ – an object is passed around and only the person with that object can speak.
Different rules can be applied: e.g. when you have the ‘conch’ you have to speak; the ‘conch’ has to be passed round the circle; the ‘conch’ can be passed to anyone you like; the conch only goes to those demonstrating good listening.
Stopping interrupting: it gives a very clear signal of who is supposed to be speaking.
Can help quieter people to speak, because they know they won’t be interrupted and/or they are required to.
The ‘conch’ becoming a distraction.
Meetings becoming slow if there is no Chair to pass the ‘conch’ on.
Small groups – set the question and then split the class in to small groups (3-6). Ask them to discuss it and come up with one answer that they can all agree on. Have one person from each group give their group’s answer and reasoning.
Allows everyone to have a say without taking too long.
Encourages compromise within the small group.
One person dominating a small group.
If all the small groups come up with different answers coming to a conclusion may need further discussions.
Losing your marbles – give each person 3 marbles. When someone speaks they have to hand over a marble, so once they’ve contributed three times they need to stay quiet. You can also turn this round and say by the end of the meeting everyone needs to have lost all of their marbles.
Making sure the meeting isn’t dominated by a few people.
Encouraging people to consider what is really important for them to contribute to.
Keeping track of who contributes and who doesn’t.
Having everyone run out of marbles before the end – you need to make sure everyone knows what is coming up, so they can plan when to use a marble.
What methods do you use to liven up your meetings and ensure that everyone gets a say?
The new headteacher of Welbourne Primary School in Tottenham – the school I’m a governor of – has asked me to help set up a new school council. My first step is to come up with a draft policy that I’ll use as the starting point for discussions with staff and pupils.
Download this sample policy to adapt and use: [download id=”240″]
I’m obviously trying to keep it short and simple so everyone can understand it. Here’s my first attempt. I’ll update it as the discussions progress. Do you have any comments or suggestions?
Well, I couldn't quite get it down to 10, but it's what we're aiming for.
What is our school council for?
The school council is about:
Learning to work together
Learning about democracy
Learning how to play a positive role in our community
The school council’s job is to involve everyone, not do everything. It needs to get everyone:
Finding things they want to change
Coming up with ways to make them better
Putting those ideas in to action
Seeing what works (evaluating)
How does our class council work?
Our whole class has a meeting every 2 weeks on [day] at [time].
We decide what we’re going to talk about the day before the meeting, so everyone has time to think.
A different person runs the meeting each time (with help from the teacher if they need it).
A different person takes notes each time (with help from the teacher if they need it).
We choose two people from our class to go to a whole school council meeting.
What will the school council do for our class?
When you give your class representative an idea, she or he will:
Note it down
Take it to the next school council meeting
Tell you what is happening to your idea within two weeks
The school council will try to make your idea happen by getting:
Permission
Support
Money
Time
If they can’t they will tell you why not.
If they can, they will want your class to help make your idea happen.
What will teachers and TAs do for the school council?
Make sure meetings happen when they are supposed to.
Support pupils to run meetings.
The Headteacher will answer all the school council’s questions within 1 week.
If the Headteacher has to say ‘no’ to anything, she will explain why.
Now, this isn’t as short and snappy as I’d hoped, but I think it’s a good start. We’ll see what we can cut out as we go, without losing the essence of it. We’ll also be trying to create a pictorial version. I’m sure doing that will help us work out what’s really essential.
Download this sample policy to adapt and use: [download id=”240″]
When schools are being blamed for not connecting young people with their communities, a key tool that helped young people to see that their communities are what they make them, not something that happens to them, has been swept away.
Under the previous Ofsted framework student voice (and thereby the importance of students to the school community) was emphasised in three ways:
Schools had to show in their Self-Evaluations Forms (SEFs) how they had engaged with and listened to students as part of their on-going strive to improve.
Ofsted inspectors met with students who had been elected by their peers as their representatives (the school council).
Ofsted wrote a clear, simple letter direct to students (via the school council) explaining the key findings of their inspection.*
All of these have disappeared.
All of them showed students that they had a stake in the school and their own education, they were not just raw material with which good teachers would make good grades and bad teachers would make bad grades.
Now it has been pointed out to me that good schools will do this anyway and I’m sure they will because they’ve seen the benefits, but it’s about getting those other schools to try it so they also see the benefits. Showcasing and sharing good practice is important but it can never provide the same impetus for schools that feel too nervous or busy to try things that the carrot/stick of an Ofsted grading can.
Once schools do get over that first hurdle they see how teaching and learning can be improved, how pupils’ self-confidence and communication skills grow and how pupils come to have a greater respect for a community they feel respects them. One of the most positive things Ofsted did was help schools take that first step. I fear that the new Ofsted framework will further widen the gap between those students who feel their community listens to them and those who don’t. We will end up with schools that produce young people with high grades but no skills with which to apply them. No understanding of teamwork, compromise, respect or self-determination. That’s not to say that the schools that do actively encourage students to express their views, collaborate and be critical thinkers won’t also get high grades, far from it, but their students will have so much more on top of the grades.
So what could Ofsted do? Well, given that they’re not going to reinstate the SEF, they should at least do numbers 2 and 3 above. They should extend to students the system that they will be releasing in October for surveying parents; this will give a much more complete and detailed picture (as staff and governors will be spoken to directly). They also need to define far more carefully what they mean by ‘take account of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils when judging the overall effectiveness of the school’. But if they don’t act fast I think we will see a still nascent area of learning, student voice, disappear in many schools and with it any constructive way for many students to feedback on, engage with and improve their schools.
* This was also published online and I bet it was pretty useful to many parents too, as it was much easier to read than the formulaic, lengthy and jargon-heavy main reports. Have a look for yourself (the letter to the pupils is at the bottom): Welbourne Primary School Ofsted Report 2009
Working with primary school councils in Oldham and Haringey over the last two days I ran in to the same issue that so many schools and their councils struggle with: can we get beyond talking about the toilets?
The simple suggestion I gave to them is to split their School Council in to Action Teams. This ensures that their school councils look beyond the physical and start to deal with all the things that are going on in their schools. We find these Action Teams cover most aspects of what goes on in school:
Learning
Helping everyone to enjoy learning
Trips
Bringing people in to the school
What happens in class
Relationships
Helping people have fun
Stopping bullying
Making school friendly
Fundraising & Events
Finding out what needs money
Making money
Putting on competitions, shows and special days
Environment
Saving energy
Recycling
Making sure the school looks good
Getting fun equipment
Communication
Letting people know what’s going on
Getting ideas
Assemblies
Website
Noticeboard
If you just want to have four Action Teams you could miss out Communication, but then you need to make sure all other groups share responsibility for this and report back on their communication each time.
So all items brought up from class council meetings, suggestion boxes, from the school council blog, etc. get allocated to the most appropriate Action Team by the Chair and Secretary (with support from the Link Teacher if they need it). The Action Teams then need to meet to discuss those issues and figure out which ones they can take action on (if nothing has been suggested for an Action Team, they need to seek something out). These actions are then what is taken to the full School Council meeting for ratification. You could fit in this extra meeting by replacing every other School Council meeting with Action Team meetings or by having the Action Team meetings for the first third or half of the time allocated for the School Council meeting.
The school council meeting becomes a way to co-ordinate all the pupil-led activities and to check that no actions will adversely affect any pupils. So it has a standing agenda of:
Item
Person
Time
1
Apologies (from people who can’t make the meeting)
Secretary
1 min
2
Check last meeting’s minutes (to make sure they’re correct)
Chair
2 mins
3
Learning Action Team
Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
LAT Chair
5 mins
4
Relationships Action Team
Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
RAT Chair
5 mins
5
Fundraising and Events Action Team
Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
FaEAT Chair
5 mins
6
Environment Action Team
Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
EAT Chair
5 mins
7
Communication Action Team
Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
CAT Chair
5 mins
8
Any other business (A.O.B.)
Chair
2 mins
9
Date of next meeting
Secretary
1 min
This way the meetings should be focussed on action, should discuss more than just what colour to paint the toilets and be quicker – as the reports are not for in-depth discussion, just for ratification.
Loads of school council elections are taking place across the country, but many of them aren’t organised as well as they could be.
Often this is perfectly understandable; running the election is sometimes thrust upon an unsuspecting teacher, so here’s a complication of the resources we’ve got to help you out!
1. A set of 15 minute short tutor time activities to help plan a school council election:
3. Our school council reps toolkit might help students understand what’s involved as a school councillor (sometimes if they’re not sure what’s involved, they won’t put themselves forward).
