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:
Just before half term I ran a training course for ASCL (the Association of School and College Leaders), as part of this we collected together a wide variety of student voice activities that the participants had come across. We also highlighted a number of issues that could come up in trying to implement these schemes.
I thought this was a great collection so I’m sharing them with you here. Please add any other ideas in the comments and I’ll add them to the mindmap.
To see the whole mindmap (it’s pretty large) click on (in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
To see the whole mindmap (it’s pretty large) click on (in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
Student Voice Ideas and Issues
+– Behaviour
+– Support
Conflict resolution
Target setting
Buddies
+– Monitoring/enforcement
Student Panel
Prefect System
Prefect system based on school council
‘Self Government’ responsible for rules
+– Policy-making
Code of Conduct
Setting class groundrules
Linking local community to school council to deal with after school issues
Head boy/girl oversee prefect system
Rewards and sanctions group
+– Issues
+– Due to structure
Involving all students
Power
Money
Time
Influence
Succession
+– Fears
Is it democratic?
Censorship required?
Getting a representative group
Getting responses completed and handed back
Pleasing everyone
Unsupportive colleagues
+– Individuals’ ability
+– Lack of training
Staff
Students
Making decsions
Planning issues
Confidentiality
Realistic/appropriate ideas
+– Perception issues
Seen negatively by other students
Pupils not on council/identified by badges, ties, etc. might feel they have less influence
Getting people to recognise the importance
+– Teaching and Learning
Pupil interview panels
Students to reseacrh attitudes to learning
+– Peer support
Peer assessment
Peer mentoring
Peer tutoring (reluctant readers)
Student academic mentors
+– Formal student evaluation
Student SEF
Faculty reviews
Insted (student Ofsted)
Lesson observations by student council
Reviews
Student observers
Students observing rooms focussing on noticeboards and levelled work
+– Informal student evaluation
Learning walks
Discussion on T&L
+– Student planning and teaching
Students teaching G&T lessons
Numeracy, literacy and sports leaders
Curriculum planning
Ambassadors for different subject areas
Sports ambassadors
+– Environment
+– Eco
+– Reducing carbon footprint
Students approached governors and got £500 to kick off project
Campaign to use both sides of paper in ICT
+– Eco council
Huge electricity bill
School eco bag
Sustainability
Recycled stationery shop
Eco bags competition
+– Built environment
Surveys
Students designing toilets in BSF
Changing the building
Environmental group (outside spaces)
+– School environment
Sub-committees
New uniform put in place by school council
School improvement
House leaders recognised through their tie and jumpers
Fund raising for school council to meet objectives
+– Relationships
Appointments
+– Leaders wristbands
Community
Befriender
Attender
+– Fund raising activities
Enterprise
Anti-bullying (FAB)
Good Citizenship Awards
+– Peer mentoring
Bullying
Advisors
Student website
Council target setting using SMART targets to measure success
Most of the schools I meet use terms like ‘community’, ‘the school as a family’, ‘listening to and valuing all pupils’ and ’empowering learners’.
So how do you prove the ethos of your school?
Can you measure your school’s ethos?
Now those are a couple of tricky questions (not least grammatically). The answers I usually see are:
You could write it above the entrance as a motto/vision/mission statement.
Do a survey to feel if people feel ‘listened to/safe/happy/enlightened/self-actualised’ (okay, I haven’t actually heard either of the last two).
Participatory Budgeting toolkit by PB Unit
Yesterday Greg and I spent a fascinating few hours discussing something far more tangible, empowering and effective: participatory budgeting (now there’s a name to get the pulse racing!). We were at a meeting convened by the Participatory Budgeting Unit, Citizenship Foundation and ourselves and attended by several other organisations with a range of interests and experiences in the field.
The idea of participatory budgeting, as I see it, is simple:
You involve the people whose money is being spent in the decisions about how that money is spent. (Wikipedia goes into more detail, naturally)
So how does this relate to school ethos? Well, if you say you’re a school that listens to your pupils, how about listening to them on a proportion of your budget? Set a percentage, set some boundaries and a structure, listen and then act (even better, help them to act).
Like it or not money is essential to how a school works. If you really want to involve your whole school community in decision-making then that’s going to involve how money is spent. Make a statement. Involve the whole school in he process and let them see the outcomes.
This also gives you a yardstick by which to measure how you are progressing. The more trust grows between staff, students and governors; the more students learn about how the school runs; the more responsible they show themselves to be: the larger the percentage of the budget is that they help control.
Over the coming months we (the meeting organisers) intend to help produce tools and guidance to assist schools in involving all pupils in ‘PB’.
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:
The event was at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, a lovely venue, but I walked through this hothouse and so arrived with steamed up glasses, trying to avoid stumbling into people.
I was at the GTCE‘s ‘Leading a dialogue on pupil participation‘ event today, which I’m sure was called ‘From pupil voice to pupil participation’ when I signed up but never mind, I’m just as happy leading a dialogue as I am moving from one thing to something better.
I must say I was really impressed with the GTCE’s approach to participation and education in general. Their slogan of ‘for children, through teachers’ really chimes in with my view of teaching. The address by Chief Exec, Keith Bartley, really laid out how they see pupil participation as essential to successful and effective learning and teaching. This isn’t just idealistic stuff either, they’re backing it up with research and the event today was partly a launch for their new research anthology ‘Improving pupil learning through enhancing participation‘. It looks like a really good and useful piece of work – I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but it’s my bedtime reading for the rest of the week, it should be yours too. The research looks at variety of drivers and outcomes for participation and I think should be very useful for anyone looking to demonstrate the value to colleagues (or themselves) of this work, as well as giving many practical suggestions for how it can be applied and lots of links to further research.
Some great examples came out of the presentation of this work by Dr David Frost of Cambridge
Dr David Frost (just so you could be sure it wasn’t the other one)
University/Leadership for Learning, one of the authors of the piece. One that particularly stood out for me was a primary school where Y6 pupils had been trained to run circle time and they facilitated this for groups that included pupils from all ages in the school – one can imagine what this might do for a primary school’s sense of community.
A later presentation by Tom Murphy, a new science teacher from a Hertfordshire secondary school, talked about the benefits for his pupils when he asked them to teach full lessons for one another. Not only did they understand the topics better in many cases, it also created a ‘buzz’ for him and students before each lesson, as they never knew how it would be delivered. I intend to follow this work up with him and share more of this here as soon as I can.
We also heard from the deputy head of a special school about how creative they had had to be in using a huge variety of communication methods to ensure that all of their pupils could express themselves and make choices about their school, learning and lives.
Well, it’s late and I realise I’m kind of just reporting the event now, rather than discussing or developing any of the ideas that came out of it further, so I’ll come back to this in the next few days and add another post with some further thoughts.
The revolutionary school council? (They're supposed to be wearing berets :-))
Culture is a great thing, it gives us a sense of identity, place and often purpose too, but it doesn’t do much for progress. In many ways culture is the embedding of a certain way of doing things through unquestioning repetition.
All major changes in industry, science, religion, society and thought have come from people or ideas that went against the prevailing culture. For the purposes of this blog, I’m going to call this counter-culture; it sets out with one maxim:
We do not accept a view simply because it is stated by someone in a position of authority; it has to be proved to be of value to us.
Counter-culture is absolutely necessary for any society (or institution) that wants to learn and improve. Having assumptions challenged means the good ideas grow stronger and the poor ones are done away with. It recognises the need for constant re-evaluation (which is very different from constant change).
It seems to me that this is what should be at the heart of all education: working out from first principles what is valid, not basing our ideas on assumptions. So to what extent are our educational institutions counter-cultural? How do they inculcate this approach? I would argue that in most cases they don’t, they in fact do exactly the opposite.
In almost every school in the country there is a school/pupil/student council (or it may go by some other name on a similar theme). The aim of each of these is ‘to improve the school’, but how many really have the tools to do it? Most are given a narrow set of responsibilities and very limited scope in which to carry them out. Will this ever excite, represent or challenge most of the students or staff? If not, why are we doing them in school?
A number of questions I have been asked or that I have had to ask myself over the last couple of weeks have really brought this into focus for me:
From secondary school pupils:
Should staff set the agenda for our school council meetings?
Should we (the school council) be allowed to talk about and make statements on whatever is important to pupils?
Should staff play a role in selecting school council members?
From other researchers/practitioners in the field:
Are school councils merely there to deal with issues as they arise or should they create policy to pre-empt issues?
Does the headteacher lead the pupils in a school or does s/he just manage the staff?
Is it better to have a ‘learning council’ than a ‘pupil council’? (The suggesting being it puts learning at the heart of what it does, but I ask, ‘why demote pupils from being at the heart of what it does?’)
From discussions with an ex-school student leader from Greece:
What can a school council do if it’s not listened to? (In Greece they go on strike or occupy the school)
When staff allow students space to challenge they are forced into a real debate and both ‘sides’ have to question their own assumptions. Where schools just get students to help them with the things staff want to do there will be positive change, but it will be limited, never revolutionary.
(in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
