Nice, huh?
Tag: meetings
Asher and I had a great day at Parliament last week.
It was the Speaker’s School Council Awards Ceremony, that we’ve helped Parliament out on for the second year running. It’s been a brilliant project for us to work on.
The five winning schools came from across the UK to get a tour of Parliament, a sharing session in one of the committee rooms, and the awards ceremony with the Speaker. The winning schools are:
- Radyr Comprehensive School, Cardiff
- Shuttleworth College, Burnley
- Welling School, Kent
- New Earswick Primary School, York
- Rice Lane Infant and Nursery School, Liverpool
You can read more about them here.
Took a few terrible snaps (I’ll try to add some proper ones soon). Here’s Asher setting up in the Committee Room:
Here’s Asher having a go on the big chair:
Also lovely to see Millicent from ACT, Laura Hoke, Laura from Changemakers, and Andy from Citizenship Foundation there.
And here’s an exciting project that Parliament are working on. Worth a look.
We helped make this series of six videos for Parliament’s Education Service. As well as encouraging schools to enter the Speaker’s School Council Award they contain loads of great tips from MPs and school councillors of all ages on how to make any project a success.
If your school council or project team is getting a bit stuck have a watch of some of these, they might just give you a few ideas.
Why enter the Speaker’s School Council Award
Getting ideas and choosing a project
Planning your project
Keeping your team on track
Keeping people informed and involved
Evaluating your project
These videos were all shot, directed and edited by the fantastic Kwame Lestrade of Franklyn Lane Films.
This is part two of a blog on Little Heath’s Student Voice conference. You can read the first part here. This concentrated on the older students who were organising the conference, and the adults that supported them.
This second part will look at the experience of some of the younger pupils who are more recently involved with student voice. Let’s focus on student voice in learning since it’s one of the areas that the school does amazingly well. This centres around the STARs project – Students as Researchers.
The STARs (students as researchers) project is a key part of student voice in Little Heath. It’s designed to give the students an influence in their learning and school-life. Importantly, this isn’t based on whim, but research. Even more importantly, this research is student-led.
This first group looked at the types of homework that students liked most. Lots of students were complaining about their homework so they worked on a questionnaire to send out to pupils. The results were presented to Governors and SLT.
Here’s two year 9 students telling us about their STARs project. As opposed to the first group, this project focuses on classroom teaching. It looks at specific subjects: English, History and ICT in years 7 and 8. A crucial area to look at, and some very useful findings:
This group looked at the help that is available for students within the school. Here’s a member of the group talking us through the teacher questionnaire that they organised, and what will happen to their ideas:
Members of the STARs team can get involved year after year. These two members led a successful project last year, and are doing a first plan for their anti-bullying project this year:
Lots of the learning from the STARs project goes into a booklet which is given out to the school to publicise their work. Here’s the team in charge of making it:
Ongoing reflections on Homework:
Year 7 pupils (I think) talking us through their planner/homework diary/timetable.
They’re encouraged to reflect on what they’ve learnt and their homework, if there was too much or if they really enjoyed it. Teachers would then look at this. It’s a simple but good way to encourage reflection on learning and start a conversation with teachers.
Student voice in school planning:
Year 7 pupils on the Buildings and Environment group looking at how to improve this aspect of their school. They’re starting point is how they would make their school into the ‘dream school’ and they’re drawing a big map. They’re clearly getting a lot from approaching this in a visual way.
Key quote ‘it makes it come to life’
So that’s a taster of some of the great work being worked on by the younger pupils at Little Heath. The range of student voice work is really amazing, and if you’re interested, take a look at my original post from last year’s conference for a bit of analysis into why it works so well.
Well done to everyone involved :)
Greg
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.
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