InvolverLots of schools are beginning to think about training their school council, or student voice groups, for next academic year.
If you want to make your student voice READY, then get in touch! You can read more about our training here.
It might be two days training to breathe new life into your tired school council, a staff INSET on student voice, or a half day workshop supporting students to be on an interview panel. Whatever it is, all of our training aims to make student voice:
School councils. Student voice. Giving young people a say in how their school is run. Sounds like effort, doesn’t it? Kids are there to be educated, not to take part in it, right?
So why do so many schools bother with it? Because the Government says you have to listen to pupils? Because Ofsted might come and chat to your school council? Because some kids had a couple of good ideas and you might as well give it a go? Because some kids want to practice being politicians, and you need to give them a way to do that?
Let’s be clear : schools present a unique opportunity for young people to learn about democracy.
And let’s be double – clear: this opportunity is being missed by too many schools.
Student voice and school councils are often tokenistic. Young people are told that they have influence (but only the cleverest or most confident are allowed to use it), that they are listened to (as long as they give the right answer), and that they are free to talk about what they want (but can’t actually do anything to make things better).
Our approach is to help schools make the most of this opportunity, challenge tokenism, and help get more young people involved.
Very simply, we want young people to understand how their ideas can turn into actions which can turn into improvements for themselves and others. Learning democracy by ‘doing democracy’. Less sitting back and moaning about things, and more action!
I was working in Islamia Primary School in Brent yesterday, helping their new student voice team to plan for next year. One of the big ideas that came up was trying to get mirrors in the girls’ toilets. The girls’ headscarves were coming loose during the school day, and they had no mirrors to check if they were on properly. When they return from their summer break, the team plan to get going on this idea. They are six years old.
Now this might just be a few mirrors, but if young people can see how they can influence their lives and surroundings from a young age this plants important seeds. As they become secondary age students they will believe that they can take action and change things, and then university students will too.
Young people will find it more difficult to have the desire or to understand how they can change things in adult life if they’ve had no practice! Or if they’ve been kept in a simulated democratic world where they are ‘listened to’ but never have the experience of negotiating, collaborating and struggling to achieve their own, shared aims.
And this should never be just about training the next generation of politicians – if you know how to ‘plan’, ‘do’ and ‘reflect’ a project with a group of people, that is useful whatever you choose to do in life.
It’s also very important that schools connect learning about the same concepts. We’re all agreed that democracy and empowerment are important concepts, right?
So let’s use every opportunity we can to connect what we can learn about in the news, in the curriculum, with what we do in student voice. It’s about connecting what others do, with what we do.
Let’s reflect on MPs expenses, by talking about school councillor expenses; let’s discuss the coalition government by talking about how easy it is to decide things by committee; let’s think about the civil rights movement and suffragettes when planning a student voice election. We grasp things best when we understand them from different angles.
Not seeing these links can undermine everything. You might be less inspired about by Barack Obama’s democratic journey if your ‘democratic’ school council is just the ten brightest pupils, picked by the head teacher!
So let’s be clear: a healthy democracy needs curious, active people. A healthy democracy needs healthy democratic education, and schools are central to that.
Let’s not be complacent.
Greg
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Hello from involver – newsletter number 2
Hope you’re all doing well and enjoying the sun and World Cup. We’ve created some new resources and found a few things that you and your schools might find useful, so here they are …
Resource: Pupil interview panels – getting it right
After a lot of misconceptions in the press about what this involves, we’ve written a brief guide to getting the most out of interview panels that involve students.
http://involver.org.uk/2010/04/pupil-interview-panels-getting-it-right/
Resource: More student voice ideas, issues and some solutions
Some really great ideas and suggestions came up from training we’ve run recently for ASCL, in London, and Wolverhampton Local Authority in, well, Wolverhampton. You or schools you work with may find them useful and we’d find it really useful if you add any suggestions of your own.
http://involver.org.uk/2010/06/school-council-ideas-and-student-voice-issues/
http://involver.org.uk/2010/06/common-school-council-issues-with-solutions/
Resource: Excellent World Cup learning activities
You know we couldn’t get through this newsletter without one World Cup resource, and this one from LSIS is great (if you don’t work in post-16 we’re sure you resourceful involvers could adapt it).
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/media/Post16%20Citizenship%20Support%20Programme/Football_supplement_FINAL.pdf
Website: Got a school council website? Add it to our showcase
We’re building up a list of great school council websites – if you have would like to be featured here, please email us at info@involver.org.uk
Tiffany Ryan of Changemakers has been helping us out with this – thanks Tiffany!
http://involver.org.uk/links/school-councils-websites/
Also, if you think our site is useful and want to help others find it, please link to us on your blog or website.
Event: Speaker’s School Council Awards
After 2,500 schools registering interest, hundreds of schools have applied to the Speaker’s School Council Awards. We helped Parliament and the excellent team of judges to whittle the entries down to twenty. Each of these fantastic school council projects will attend an exciting awards ceremony in Parliament on June 23rd. John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, will award a winner in each age category, so thanks to everyone for applying! You can see schools that have been shortlisted at:
http://www.parliament.uk/education/special-events-and-programmes/speakers-school-council/
Event: AGON – Ancient Greek-style political drama debate
On the 6th of July secondary students from Enfield will be running this innovative event which encourages discussion on issues about media and celebrity through any medium, including drama, dance, music and film. Anyone and everyone is invited to be part of the audience and take part. It’s at the Scoop Amphitheatre next to the GLA buildings by Tower Bridge, London, fittingly.
Email mark.barrett@kingsmead.org for more details.
Video: Kids taking charge – India-style
Ever visit the TED website? It’s one of our favourites. Here’s a link to an inspiring eight minute talk on the ‘I can bug’ developed by Kiran Bir Sethi of Riverside School, Ahmedebad, India.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge.html
Research: PSHE in schools and empowering students
Researchers from Brighton University need your help to collect responses from students on how they get to have a say in what topics should be included in PSHE. They are also seeking their views on the curriculum delivered in schools currently. Please give this link to your students and colleagues:
https://eforms.crawley.gov.uk/af3/an/default.aspx/RenderForm/?F.Name=AVhVYHSESfL
Networking-fun: Democraball!
Democraball! runs every month and new players and supporters are always welcome. It’s now got a Facebook group so if you’re in London, and fancy a (very amateur) game of five a side football, then join the group or get in touch at info@involver.org.uk.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=127543770612104
Remember, if you want to get in touch about anything we’re up to, then please email us at info@involver.org.uk. We’re also always keen to hear about and share good practice, new resources or developments in student voice.
Thanks!
Greg and Asher @ involver
If you want to our newsletter in your inbox each month, put your email address in the ‘get our newsletter box’ in the top right of this page.
I posted yesterday about a number of student voice ideas and issues that came up at a training session I ran recently. It seemed a bit remiss to leave those issues just hanging there, we are in the business of (helping you) solve those kinds of problems after all. Luckily I took some photos last week at the training I ran for Wolverhampton’s primary school council co-ordinators where we were looking at what solutions they might use for just some of these problems.
Apologies for the rather garish colours but they actually make the images more readable (honestly). If any of them are too small to read, click on them and you’ll be able to see a larger version. These are the issues we looked at:
Just before half term I ran a training course for ASCL (the Association of School and College Leaders), as part of this we collected together a wide variety of student voice activities that the participants had come across. We also highlighted a number of issues that could come up in trying to implement these schemes.
I thought this was a great collection so I’m sharing them with you here. Please add any other ideas in the comments and I’ll add them to the mindmap.
To see the whole mindmap (it’s pretty large) click on 
(in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
[iframe http://mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=ca7480b6-1c1e-4967-9747-f328bb4b3b09 100% 500px]
To see the whole mindmap (it’s pretty large) click on (in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
Student Voice Ideas and Issues
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’.
Now those are a couple of tricky questions (not least grammatically). The answers I usually see are:
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’.