Tag: KS3 (P7-S1-S2)

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Student Voice Conference by Alison, Student Voice Assistant

Here’s Alison’s second blog, about the amazing Student Voice Conference at Little Heath! I’ve got a few videos from the day too, which I’ll upload soon.

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks!

Wednesday 2nd February was our annual Student Voice Conference at Little Heath. If I’m being honest I can’t believe it is over for another year! But there is still lots of work to keep us busy.

The conference was a real success.

Alok Sharma, MP for Reading West opened the day and encouraged the students in the importance of youth participation. The three workshops that took place were really thought provoking. Some really interesting ideas have come up as new projects for the STARS (Students As Researchers) to research. A particular favourite of mine is the idea of students having influence in teachers planning and having a say in the content of their lessons and the way it is taught.

The second workshop on student leadership got students thinking about the things that they want to be recognised for and how this can fit into a framework. For example, how the framework could be based around bronze, silver and gold levels. There were so many ways that students would like to be recognised for leadership, not just in Student Voice. They came up with ideas like Duke of Edinburgh, leading reading clubs and doing community service. It is exciting that the content and design for this framework is going to come completely from the students.

The third workshop looked at student Rights and Responsibilities. This linked into behaviour and how students want to feel safe. In addition, they looked at what helps them in the classroom to have a more effective learning experience. The students were also really forthcoming with ideas and how to refresh the schools Code of Conduct document into something more student friendly.

A question panel in the afternoon was a good chance for the students to ask questions to some of the staff. Questions about what they think makes a good learning environment, curriculum developments, advice for pathways after leaving Little Heath and also views on learning from former students.

Overall, the day was a credit to the enthusiasm of the students and their eagerness to be influential in their own education.

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School councils: how to make them inclusive

One 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

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involver blog Newsletters

Newsletter 6: New awards, new training and new resources for the New Year

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

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involver blog Resources

From school council noticeboards to progress boards

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:

  • Photos of the school council (often last year’s)
  • Minutes of the the last meeting (who stops at a noticeboard to read closely-typed minutes?)
  • A poster saying ‘have your say/make a difference/we’re your voice!’

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:

  • What the school council is working on
  • Who they talk to to get involved
  • What the hold ups are (this can put gentle pressure on a slow-moving Headteacher or Caretaker to respond)
  • What’s off-limits and what’s been achieved

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.

School council progress board
If you set up a board like this you need to make sure it is updated at least once a week: make a member of the school council Progress Board Officer. Click the image to see the full-sized version.

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.

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involver blog Resources

School council training: collecting information

Picture of whole school assemblyTo be effective school councils have to be expert communicators. Often a lot of emphasis is put on public speaking, and out-going communication, but communication is a two way process and arguably how a school council collects information is even more important.

To help a secondary school in Brent think about how they canvass the views of their whole school I wrote this short, simple session.  They seemed to enjoy it and it helped them come up with some really useful ideas. Why don’t you give it a try and see if it works for you?

Download the session and resources: [download id=”222″]

Aims:

  • For participants to experience a few different ways of collecting information.
  • For participants to explore what those methods might be good for and what drawbacks they might have.

Age range: 11-18

Group size: 12-30

Time: 20-30 mins

Resources:

  • Notepad
  • Whiteboard/flipchart
  • Tables
  • Chairs
  • Pens
  • Marker pens
  • Paper stuck to wall
  • Room big enough for people to move around in.
  • Collecting ideas instructions sheets
  • Face-to-face survey sheets (x5)
  • Written survey sheets (x5)

Method:

  1. Before the session starts (I did this during the previous session), select 5 people who will be your ‘researchers’.
  2. Explain to each of them what they will be doing (give each of them an instruction sheet).
  3. Send each of your researchers to the area they’ll be working in.
  4. Split the rest of the class up and send them to
    • 1/3 to meeting
    • 1/3 to written survey
    • 1/3 to opinion wall
    • N.B. None to informal chat or face-to-face survey
  5. Tell them they’ve got 10 minutes to discuss/fill out surveys, etc.
  6. After 10 minutes bring them all back into one group.
  7. Ask each of the researchers to feed back their findings in turn.
  8. Also ask them how they found using that method.
  9. After each one ask the group to think about what situations it might be good to use that research method for.
  10. Write these up.

Add-on: Put participants into pairs, get each pair to decide on a question and a research method they will use in the next week.

Obviously you can add in other research methods, making sure you stick to the principle that they’re using the method to find out whether or not it’s a good method.

Download the session and resources: [download id=”222″]

Download the session outline and resources as Word documents (all of these are included as one download above):

  • [download id=”223″]
  • [download id=”224″]
  • [download id=”225″]
  • [download id=”226″]
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School council reps’ tookit

I wrote this little pocket guide for the school councils of some secondary schools I’m working with. It should be useful to anyone who’s interested in becoming a rep (representative) or is one already and wants some tips on how to make a good job of it.

Most schools have reps as part of the way they run student voice, often class reps, year or house council reps and then even school council reps who might meet with people from other schools.

But being a rep’s not easy, so here are some tips and guides on how to do it well.

Inside you’ll find answers to all of these questions:

  • What is a rep (representative)?
  • What’s good student voice?
  • What does a rep do?
  • How do I collect views?
  • How do I create change?
  • How do meetings work?
  • What should I ask in meetings?
  • How do I run a meeting?
  • What are minutes?
  • Can meetings be fun?
  • How do I present an idea?
  • How do we get things done?

It’s designed as an A5 booklet so if you print it our double-sided onto A4 all the pages should match up

Download the PDF here:

[download id=”220″]

As with all of our work, we release it under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence, so if you want to remix it – add your own logos, etc. – you can do that with the Publisher files here:

[download id=”221″]