Tag: KS2 (P3-P4-P5-P6)

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Primary school council policy

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?

The 10 Commandments from flcikr/jbtaylor
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″]

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Who decides? Student voice boundaries and possibilities

This is a great little session to do at the beginning of the year when you’re trying to figure out what you want your school council (or student voice more broadly) to get involved with.

I think it works particularly well when you have groups of staff and students in the same room and then get them to look at one another’s lists at the end.

  1. Download these cards and cut them up (each group needs one set): [download id=”238″]
  2. Split people into small groups. If working with pupils and staff together have separate staff and pupil groups.
  3. Get them to sort the cards as a group, discussing each one briefly as they go.
  4. You can ask different groups to do:
    • As it is now
    • How they think it should be
    • How they think pupils/staff want it to be (whichever they aren’t)
  5. Get the groups to look at one another’s cards and discuss any differences or surprises.

You can do this is a short session (15 minutes) but if often provokes quite a lot of debate, so it can easily stretch to 45 (15 minutes sorting and 30 discusing).

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The new Ofsted framework will undermine student voice

The new framework for school inspections released by Ofsted today removes all pressure on schools to involve their students in self-evaluation and improving their own community.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Ofsted inspectors met with students who had been elected by their peers as their representatives (the school council).
  3. 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.

Letter stating that Ofsted are on their way to inspect the schoolNow 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

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Out of the toilet and in to the classroom

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

 Learning
  • Helping everyone to enjoy learning
  • Trips
  • Bringing people in to the school
  • What happens in class

Relationships

 Relationships
  • Helping people have fun
  • Stopping bullying
  • Making school friendly

Fundraising & Events

 Fundraising
  • Finding out what needs money
  • Making money
  • Putting on competitions, shows and special days

Environment

 Environment
  • Saving energy
  • Recycling
  • Making sure the school looks good
  • Getting fun equipment

Communication

 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.

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School council elections: compilation of free resources

It’s the beginning of the school term.

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:

http://involver.org.uk/2011/03/school-council-election-tutor-form-time-activities

2. Practical steps on running a school council election, setting it up and questions about if you REALLY need to have one:

http://involver.org.uk/2010/08/school-council-elections-planning-for-success/

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).

http://involver.org.uk/2010/10/school-council-reps-tookit/

4. It’s important to have a think about what type of school council model (and therefore election) you need to have:

http://involver.org.uk/2011/07/school-councils-and-democracy-pick-your-model-carefully/

5. Once you’ve got your reps, then use this ‘getting to know your reps’ game:

http://involver.org.uk/2009/09/getting-to-know-your-reps-game-template/

6. Try and avoid this!

http://involver.org.uk/2009/09/school-council-election-fraud-as-it-happens/

And remember, you can always email us if you want some help or advice. Or feel free to suggest a new election resource for us to write.

Greg

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School councils – welcome back!

Hello everyone,

Welcome back to school. Hope you all had a fun summer!

To give you a quick  idea of what we’ve been up to…..

In between lovely holidays to Loch Ness, Aberdeen, Rugby and France, we’ve been doing lots of work on the Smart School Council Community, a charity we’re setting up and supporting.

It’s led by fifteen founding schools who we know have AMAZING student voice/school councils. Any young person, teacher or governor can join for FREE and get some help (or help others) with your school council. Good deal, right?

Head over to www.smartschoolcouncils.org.uk to get involved.

As a social enterprise based in Tottenham, we’ve been busy helping out after the riots. As well as donating and sorting clothes, Asher’s been writing about the subject and also been on the radio talking about it.  That second link features a hilarious picture of him.

Related to these events, and the questions about education and engagement in the UK today, we’re working on an exciting new film project with the Carib Theatre Company and Franklyn Lane Productions. We’ll keep you posted.

 We also had a great time at the UKYP Annual Sitting. LOADS of really engaged young people who are a credit to their areas and the UKYP too. Here’s Asher next to our stand:

And here’s our map where you could rate your school council:


Finally, don’t forget that you can get us in to do some training in your school or cluster of schools.

We’ve got lots of training booked, including trips to the Republic of Ireland and the Czech Republic.

Importantly, we’re working with many  local schools in Tottenham as part of the Smart School Council Community too.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for lots of useful advice and blogs!

Greg