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:
I've never been to a meeting quite like this, but I have been to ones where everyone is as engaged as these inanimate objects.
A couple of weeks ago I was approached by the chair of the syanagogoue I attended when I was younger. She asked me to set up a youth council with a bunch of really enthusiastic young people who have just completed their Kabbalat Torah (a kind of confirmation – a furtherance of the Bar Mitzvah).
Now, these young people are able and committed, but not neccessarily committed to the idea of sitting in meetings, but really who is? My Dad’s still an active member of the synagogue, by which I mean he goes to a lot of meetings, sits on various committees, but does he find them interesting, of course not. They’re boring and cumbersome, but they do allow him to see many of the friends he has at synagogue and he gets to contribute to the way the community runs.
So, when the Chair asked me to set up a youth council, I checked with her that this was what the young people themselves said they wanted.
‘Well, they didn’t say that exactly, but they did say they wanted to give something back and keep in contact,’ was the reply.
‘And when you say you want them to be a ‘council’, do you want them to represent the views of the other young people?’ I went on.
‘I don’t know, I hadn’t really thought of that.’
So I thought to myself, ‘really, what would work here for everyone?’
I decided that of course I didn’t have the answer, that would come from meeting the young people and asking them. So we arranged to meet one evening to discuss what interest they really had in this whole process.
We ate and chatted and discovered that they already did a lot for the synagogue, most of them volunteered as teaching assistants in the Cheder (Sunday School), one of them helped run the youth club and they’d all run a service together recently. What they really didn’t want was to feel like they were being dragged back to synagogue to eat up even more of their free time.
They were very keen though to have an excuse to get together and enjoy each other’s company and were happy to do that at the synagogue. They suggested getting together on a week night to cook for each other, eat and watch films on the synagogue’s big screen. They’re happy to organise something like this and thought that after the first one they’d invite the Chair and new Rabbi to attend for a bit to chat informally about what they wanted from (and wanted to put in to) the community.
They were happy too if the adults from the synagogue council wanted to ask them the odd question, that they might discuss over dinner and send back a response.
We discussed what would put them off coming and they resolved not to use those methods (including standing up in assembly to announce ‘an exciting new …’) to promote this event. They’re communicating with their peers in the ways that they like to communicate. I’m just on hand to offer support if they want it.
Is this exactly what the Chair expected? No, but I think in the end she’ll get a more committed, engaged group of young members, because they’re creating this experience for themselves, rather than having a structure imposed on them by adults.
Is this what the young people expected? Also not, I think they thought they’d go away with another person chasing them about coming to volunteer at another thing at the synagogue. What they got was an opportunity to keep up with their friends, and create something at the synagogue which they have ownership of, rather than just another thing they participate in.
When we’re setting up councils in schools, synagogues, churches, towns or wherever, what we want them to do is engage people in the way those communities run. So we need to set them up in a way that reflects that. Don’t make the method for engagement un-engaging, that makes sense, right?
Lots 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:
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:
It’s such a great school to visit because they really seem to get the links between the school council, Citizenship and the happiness of everyone in the school.
How do they do this:
Ensure everyone who wants to participate can. There are elected councils but also groups people can volunteer for.
There are groups that reflect a variety of interests to engage different students, to name just a few: Sports, Eco, Anne Frank (community and human rights).
All staff take responsibility and get involved with groups and committees that interest them: the PE teacher runs the Sports Committee, the Science teacher runs the Eco group, etc.
The school council is structured with a purpose, they decided to reflect the Houses of Parliament and use this as a teaching tool to help students understand the wider political system.
Pride of place is given to the pupils’ various councils and groups. They have their own committee room and displays in the reception area.
The school council is designed to be completely inclusive. Although there are no pupils with physical disabilities as Ashley School their committee room is designed to be accessible and usable by all, it includes a whole range of assistive technologies. There is even a CCTV system to meetings can be viewed all over the school.
Anyway, here’s a little video of their council chamber. Obviously we couldn’t get the kids in because of child safety issues, but you get the idea.
This is no new thing to Ashley School, they’ve been doing this work for years as this great article in the Guardian testifies: Friends, pupils, citizens
I created this short toolkit for the Salford School Council Co-ordinators Network. As with everything we’re doing at involver when we create something we want to give it away for schools to use, play around with and share (that’s why we release everything under a Creative Commons licence). So have a look at this, I think there’s some really useful stuff in there, but it’s not supposed to cover everything, so if there are things you’d like us to add, just drop us an email and we’ll keep expanding it. This is what’s in there now:
Ice breakers (4 school council-related games)
Boundaries and possibilities (2 different types of activity to explore what these might be)
School Councils are the end, not the beginning (presentation – hopefully it makes sense)
(Updated – April 2010) Planning elections
Key lines of communication (a worksheet for planning communication)
School policy on pupil participation (an essential document for any school that’s serious about pupil well-being – this is a guide to creating one)
School council constitution (you can’t really have pupil representation without one – although many try – some scenarios to set you on your way)
Tips for great meetings (guides to help you through preparing for a successful meeting, the meeting itself and ground rules to avoid pitfalls)
All three of these downloads have exactly the same stuff in:
[download id=”2″] 2.4MB You can’t really edit it, but it will look just right with our nice fonts and things.
[download id=”93″]1.3MB Best if you might want to edit things and have a newer version of Word:
[download id=”92″]2.9MB Use this if you want to edit the file and can’t open newer Word files:
