InvolverOne of the main issues that many school councils face is that they don’t include enough students. This often leaves the rest of the school pretty uninterested in what the school council are doing.
In trying to overcome this, here’s Asher giving a few ideas for you on how to think about the traditional school council structure differently.
Hope it’s useful, and that you like the video blog. We’d love to hear what you think, or some ideas on what’s worked for you.
Greg
Hello from involver – newsletter number 6.
Happy New Year and welcome to involver’s first newsletter of 2011. It’s that strange time of year when Christmas feels like it was a long time ago, but there’s still ages till it gets warm. To try and take your mind off it, here’s a rundown on what we’ve been up to and also some free stuff for you.
Resource: School Council Progress Board
Asher put together this great way for school councils to keep track of how their projects are going, and the progress that is being made. Very useful, and a lot more engaging than the old and dusty ‘school council noticeboard’ that hasn’t changed in months!
http://involver.org.uk/2010/10/school-council-progress-boards/
Awards: Speakers School Council Awards 2011 now open
The Speaker’s School Council Awards is rolling into action for a second year. This brilliant project rewards school and college councils that run innovative projects with a big impact. So get your school or college on the shiny new website and apply for the Award. It’s a great project that we’re absolutely chuffed to be working on with Parliament. Get involved at:
www.speakersschoolcouncil.org
Party: involver is 1
Towards the end of last year, involver was 1 year old. We had a little first birthday party to celebrate, and over many, many games of table football, we said thanks to the people we’ve worked with, or who have helped us out. Here’s a few pictures from the night:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=604091&id=312498090415&ref=mf
Awards: Future 100
We recently won our second award; for being one of the Future 100 Young Entrepreneurs in the UK. It’s great to be recognised in this way because setting up a new social enterprise sometimes feels quite thankless! Read more here:
http://involver.org.uk/2010/11/involver-wins-future-100-award/
Competition: £100 voucher
If you joined up to the involver newsletter after seeing our wonderfully bright pink leaflet, then welcome on board! Hope you enjoy the free resources and things we’ll be sending you from now on. Feel free to get in touch or ask a question on our site’s FAQ. The winner of the £100 vouchers was Jade Burnett-MacDonald.
News: Curriculum review and Democratic Life
As we’re sure you know, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, announced the review into the curriculum yesterday. If you’re a teacher, you’re probably groaning about this and asking whether we really need another review with another set of major changes. Whatever your views are, you can find out more here http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/curriculum/nationalcurriculum and click on the ‘Call for Evidence’ link to share your views and evidence of what works. As part of the Democratic Life campaign, we’re working hard to keep Citizenship in there!
www.democraticlife.org.uk
Article: Student Voice and CPD
Asher has written an interesting article on student voice and CPD for Iris Connect, a professional development network. Read it here:
http://irisconnecteducatio.ning.com/page/student-voice-by-asher/
Oddly, Asher also got interviewed by Keith Vaz MP for Asian Voice: http://issuu.com/abpl/docs/av_20nov2010 (page 2 no less – we really need to get some more pictures of him though)
Training: School Councils and Students as Lesson Observers
We’ve had a really busy time training in 2011 so far, with great sessions in Huddersfield, Basingstoke and a few in London, we’ve also started work with 3 secondary schools and 1 primary on setting up students as lesson observers. Also very rewarding was watching a Year 6 pupil, who we’d trained the week before, expertly chairing a KS1 school council meeting (hopefully we’ll get permission to post the video soon).
If you want to get some student voice, student leadership or school council training before the end of the finacial year, we still have some dates available but get in touch soon on info@involver.org.uk or 020 3411 3294.
http://involver.org.uk/school-council-training-and-student-voice-support
Music: January’s involver playlist
Here’s this newsletter’s spotify playlist. I must apologise in advance for the Simply Red song that features, it’s just that the title is pretty relevant in the current climate :)
http://open.spotify.com/user/scyne/playlist/4G98SVCHNTGKV3LRnL2FZT
Thanks for listening!
Greg and Asher
http://twitter.com/doingdemocracy
http://facebook.com/involver.org.uk
Can your school council noticeboard actually help drive change?
Pretty much every school I go to has one and they almost all consist of the same things:
Other than underlining for Ofsted that you have a school council, what does this actually achieve?
How about if you used that space instead for a Progress Board. This would allow everyone in the school to see:
Anyway after years of describing this idea to people and sketching it up on flipcharts at training sessions I finally created a graphic last night which shows just what I mean.
Do you have any other ideas for what might go on here (or on a board next to it).
I’d also love to see how something like this could be part of a school council’s page on their VLE or website.
Let us know in the comments if you’ve got any ideas.
How do you talk about the success of your school council?
When people visit your school do you tell them:
(a) About how this great group has redesigned the uniform, carried out an in-depth study into learning styles, raised thousands of pounds and reduced the school’s carbon footprint to zero?
(b) How it has enabled students from across the school to work together, been a channel for frustrated students to be heard and made staff think about things differently?
Almost every school I go to tells me the (a) type things – and the problems they talk about are similarly about their inability to make visible improvements to the school. But, if I ask them what their school council is they will say it’s,
a democratic body of students, there to give the students a voice in the running of the school.
They very rarely say it’s,
a group of keen and able students who help the staff.
But more and more frequently I meet teachers who tell me they’ve selected a few of the people on the council ‘to help it work better – because some of the ones who got elected might struggle’, or even that they’ve done away with elections completely to make the school council ‘more effective’.
More effective at what?
What are the success criteria for a democratic organisation?
I would suggest that the most important is how well it involves everyone, not how well it involves the ‘right’ people. If you need to change the system to make it more effective this should be to make it more inclusive, not more efficient.
But if you’re going to change the system (and I think most schools need to), why not do both? Getting the whole school involved in identifying issues, coming up with solutions and taking action will result in far more changes and and wider engagement. Focus on spreading discussion and action to class councils, rather than pulling it in to the school council. Use whole school meetings, have online forums and noticeboards that the whole school can contribute to, set up action groups that anyone can be on, set up ‘social action time’ when the whole school is supported to work on their own projects.
* Fascist dictator of the 1920s and 30s, Benito Musolinni is often claimed to ‘have made the trains run on time’, it may well be that even this achievement is over-stated: http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp
An email I received from a teacher friend last week (name and school removed to avoid blushes):
hey
I’m revamping my department handbook and I’m at the policy section, i’d really like an amazing students voice policy but I know we are very medicore at it so
HELP
________________________________
??? ???
Head of DramaLarge London Comprehensive
My response:
Keep it simple. No more than a couple of sentences on each.
- Why is student voice important to us (staff and students)?
- What does this mean in our work (what influence will students have in decision-making and T&L)?
- What does this look like (list any particular activities that will take place – evaluations, students as teachers, etc.)
- How will we measure success (what are your success criteria, how and when will you measure them)?
- When and how will you review this policy?
So the whole thing should be no more than a page in your handbook.
I would obviously suggest you work on all of these questions with your staff and students. A very simple way to do this would be to write down your first thoughts an d give them to groups of students and your staff to comment on. This could be done online using Google Docs so people could see how others are updating it and many people can work on it at once.Regards,
Asher
I think this would stand pretty well for writing a new policy for most things. What do you think?
Hello from involver: Newsletter number 3!
The summer break is almost upon us (or already here, depending on where in the UK you are), so we hope you’ve had a great year!
Here’s a round up of what we’ve been up to over the last month:
Blog: School councils and student voice: why bother?
Greg says, ‘I’m working from Scotland for most of this week, which meant a very long eight hour train journey! After a double espresso, I was feeling a bit reflective about some of the things that we’re doing with involver and why we’ve been doing them.’ Here are his thoughts:
http://involver.org.uk/2010/07/school-councils-and-student-voice-why-bother/
Training: Making your school council READY!
Lots of schools are thinking about how they can improve their school council or student voice next year – we can help you make it READY (yes, that’s an acronym, have a look here if you want to know what for):
http://involver.org.uk/2010/07/school-council-training-get-in-touch/
Resource: Great set of student voice resources from Australia
Asher came across this series of presentations and supporting resources, which was created by Nick Rate, a trainer from Australia. He’s recorded it all so the people he supports in far flung places down under can access them, but of course it means we all can, we love the internet:
http://www.jogtheweb.com/run/AlhYPd3PMcUd/Student-Voice
Video: Make Your Voice Heard: Discover Democratic Education
A great video from the States about why ‘doing democracy’ in schools is so important. It is included in the set above, but worth a special mention:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_LbZ3XcfK4
Project: Speaker’s School Council Awards 2011
After a hugely successful opening year, you can now register your interest in the Speakers School Council Awards 2011. It’s a great way to get your achievements recognised, so to get involved, hop over to:
http://www.speakersschoolcouncil.org
Evaluation: Student voice/school council progress this year?
How have you been getting on with student voice, this year? It’s not easy to get right, and it still takes work and support even when it’s a success. We’ve built a very short audit tool to help you reflect. Fill it out and we’ll even provide you with personalised feedback and ideas if you want us to:
http://involver.org.uk/participate/simple-student-voice-audit/
Network: A new Student Voice and School council Linkedin group
For those of you that use Linkedin (for those who don’t: it’s kind of like a professional Facebook), we’ve set up a group to connect and inform people about student voice and school councils. We’re still finding our way around LinkedIn, but our teacher friends tell us it’s very useful. So take a look, and join at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3089339
Networking-fun: Fantasy Democraball!
We’ve set up a fantasy football mini-league for our friends, colleagues and contacts, so please join and invite oithers. You don’t need to know anything about football, just how to add up to £100,000,000. It’s a head-to-head league, so each game you’ll be playing against another person from the citizenship/student voice/youth democracy world (your skill in beating them will be a good ice-breaker topic for when you next meet them at a conference). It’s free to sign up. Once you’ve picked your team use this code to join the ‘Democraball!’ league: 116742-35727
http://fantasy.premierleague.com
So have a great summer!
And 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.
Greg and Asher @ involver