Tag: Participation

Categories
Case Studies involver blog

School council and student voice case study: Wildern School

Wildern School in Southampton approaches student voice through UNICEF’s Rights Respecting Schools model. It’s a great example of how this approach can achieve whole-school improvements. You can read more student voice case studies here.

Key benefits:

  • A school that is well-suited to the needs of students and the way they want to learn. Students realise that they can (and have) changed major policies and decisions in the school. This helps them to feel engaged in the school.
  • Better behaviour. The “rights, respect and responsibility” ethos (drawn from the UNICEF’s Rights Respecting Schools Award) gives teachers and students consistent language and expectations across the school. It helps students to understand what right and wrong is.
  • A proactive and positive student body that improves the school in many ways. Students feel confident to suggest ideas because they are encouraged, supported and trusted to do so.

“It’s good knowing that you can come to school and know that you’re not going to be talked at all day.”

Student council member, Year 9

Top advice

  • Link everything to the school’s core values, in this case ‘rights, respect and responsibilities’. Links should be made at every relevant opportunity– from schemes of work in the curriculum, to school improvement groups, assemblies, theme days and parental engagement.
  • Remind people about these values, and how they relate to student-led change. Put posters up around the school and in classrooms, get on the school TVs, and remind staff and students in person.
  • Trust students. It is their school, and teachers are there to help them learn in an exciting and challenging way.
  • Set up systems so that students do not have to wait ages to get permission from teachers to move forward. The school has a senior leadership team (SLT) e-proposal form that any student can fill in to email to the SLT. Students have to fully consider an idea or suggestion and can get a quick permission to continue.
  • Get the right staff member to support it:

“Good student voice doesn’t cost anything. Put the right member of staff to facilitate it, give them time to do it, and start listening to all.”

Deputy headteacher

  • Start small and take the ‘sowing seeds’ approach. Do not expect to transform participation in school overnight, but start with a small-scale and focused project that you can demonstrate clear results from.
  • Help reluctant members of staff to see the importance in student voice by asking students to show them the value of student-led projects. They will start to see that students’ ideas are realistic and considered, and that it is not a ‘top-down’ trend from SLT.

Methods used:

Rights Respecting Schools Award

In 2007, students worked on a diversity project with a local school. As part of this, they became aware of UNICEF’s Rights Respecting Schools Award and the three R’s (rights, respect and responsibilities). Students were keen to bring this ethos to Wildern, and successfully encouraged the school to begin a specific project with new Year 7s.

A few years later, this ethos has really taken hold in the school. As the headteacher puts it, the three Rs are “the philosophy of the school” and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child forms “the foundation” of everything they do.

The school have since received their Level 2 Rights Respecting Schools Award and are an excellent example of what can be done with Rights Respecting Schools.

Range of ways for students to get their voice heard

There a wide range of ways for students to have a say in their learning and their school. These are all linked to, and supported by, Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These different projects include the school council, Voting Voice, school focus groups, student evaluators, department student voice meetings, virtual learning environment (VLE) forums, and class discussions.

Voting Voice

All students can have a direct impact on school issues through the Voting Voice system. An issue is picked that all tutor groups discuss at the same time. Views and votes are collected and collated from across the whole school.

This is a great way to encourage whole-school involvement in big projects, but also small issues in the school too.

School improvement groups

One of the successful ways that students get involved in school improvement is through a range of school improvement groups (SIGs).

These student-led groups that work on particular areas in the school. They include groups like Wildern TV, Community Cohesion, Creative Partnership, Learning to Learn and Developing PLTS (personal learning and thinking skills) in the classroom.

About the school:

Wildern School is a very large and heavily oversubscribed 11–16 comprehensive school serving the Hedge End, West End and Eastleigh areas of Southampton. As a community school it is open seven days a week providing a range of facilities and activities for local adults and young people. The school has been awarded specialist status in Performing Arts and is designated as a High Performing Specialist School Raising Achievement and Transforming Learning. It is also a Leading Edge school.

 

Involver conducted these case studies for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner in 2011, as part of a project to encourage schools to involve their students in decision making

Categories
Case Studies involver blog

School council and student voice case study: Reddish Vale Technology College

Here’ s Reddish Vale Technology College’s approach to student voice, focusing on the ethos of the co-operative movement. You can read more school council case studies/student voice case studies here.

Key benefits of student voice:

  • Community-minded and socially aware students who want to take an active role in the school and local area.
  • Highly politically-literate students who are driven and keen to manage their own projects.
  • Improved relationships between students, staff and students, and the community in general.
  • Improved results in the school; students with five A* to C GCSEs has increased by 31 per cent in the last four years.
  • An ethos built around social justice and the principles of the Co-operative that helps everyone to get along and resolve arguments.

“It’s about changing the world.”

Co-operative Champion, Year 10

Top advice

  • Provide a wide range of ways for students to get involved in school life – only having a school council is not enough. If you can do this, a wide range of pupils will become involved.
  • ‘Hooks’ to get students involved do not just have to centre around content areas (for example the environment or economics), but students with a particular skill (like photography or design) should be encouraged to participate too.
  • Schools should approach everyone to get involved, do not discriminate. Although you cannot force students to get involved, you can remind them and keep approaching them – you never know when they would like to do something.
  • Use something like the Co-operative’s values to involve everyone in a simple and accessible ethos. Student voice and participation becomes far easier when important values are embedded and understood across the school and between students, teachers and governors.
  • Get students involved at the heart of the community, not in isolation of it. The resources and challenges of the local community present real – not simulated – educational opportunities for student voice and action, but also help young people with certain qualifications.

Methods used:

Co-operative Champions

The school originally trained seven students as Co-operative Champions, who have now successfully trained more than 60 students across the school. The Co-operative ethos has helped to inspire students who do not usually get involved to do so.

Co-operative Champions have a jumper with a special logo on so they are recognisable around the school. They get involved in a wide range of events and projects and see their role as “making the world a better place”. They are also working on several partnerships with other schools across the world, like Reddish Vale’s sister school in Kiafeng, China.

ROC Cafe

ROC Cafe takes place every Friday night after school and gives students a safe space to relax, meet new people, and finish the week off on a positive note. ROC stands for “Redeeming Our Communities”, and the cafe opened in April 2010. Over 70 students attend most weeks, and students have had a strong role in planning and running the cafe. As one school council member put it:

“ROC Cafe has been a great success. Students have a good time and leave their troubles at the door.”

School council member, Year 9

School council

The school also has a traditional school council model, with year councils. This has an important role in school improvement and influence school decisions. This model tends to attract students who are more interested in parliamentary-style school improvement.

Ethiopian Coffee Collective

An example of one of many student-led co-operative projects: The school buys coffee directly from a coffee producer in Ethiopia, and sells it in the school. Students are learning important marketing and co-operation skills from this project, and are working hard to see it go from strength to strength.

Community engagement

The school works closely with, and for, the community in Reddish. This improves education opportunities for students, as well as the community itself. The school is also an important resource for the community – Reddish is an area of high socio-economic deprivation, and young people are involved with around 100 of the local areas 150 small businesses.

About the school

Reddish Vale Technology College is a larger than average mixed comprehensive school serving an area of relative disadvantage. The college has had specialist technology status since 1995 and has been a full service extended school since 2005. The majority of the college population are of White British heritage and few students are at the early stages of learning English.

The percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals is higher than the national average, as is the percentage of those with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. The population of the college is stable, with relatively few students joining or leaving the college after entering in Year 7. Attendance is in line with the national average and better than many similar schools.

 

Involver conducted these case studies for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner in 2011, as part of a project to encourage schools to involve their students in decision making

Categories
Case Studies

School council and student voice case study: Studfall Junior School

Over to Corby in Northamptonshire for another great school in our amazing school council and student voice case study series!

Key benefits

  • Students are able to communicate in a relaxed and confident manner.
  • Creativity and student voice are seen as interlinked, so this helps the school be creative in how it involves students and in turn students have made lessons more creative.
  • Lessons have become more engaging as a result of student comments in response to consultation on the raising achievement plan (RAP, the school development plan).

“It’s absolutely tangible, you can see it, the confidence of young people and the confidence of teachers to listen to young people. [Pupils] really make their own choices now.”

Year 4 teacher

Top advice

  • What you are doing has to be purposeful. Students need to know what their role is and that that it has potency. Set objectives, goals and targets. It is not effective if the students are not sure why they are doing it.
  • Have weekly class meetings so you can deal with everything that comes up.
  • Make sure that the class representatives have someone in their class to take notes for them. That way they can take a full part in the meeting and still have notes to help them remember everything they need to relay to the school council.
  • Have two-year terms on school council, so you roll over experience and expertise.

Methods used:

Young Consultants

“It’s an amazing learning curve for them. The children involved can speak and think about how they learn and what they want to be learning about.”

Creative Partnerships Co-ordinator

Through Creative Partnerships Studfall has been working with a local secondary school to develop creativity in their curriculum. They feel that rather than creativity just being about the arts, it is about how they involve children in all of their work. So they formed a group of young consultants (YCs) to be the pupil voice within the Creative Partnerships work they were doing. To ensure this was not tokenistic they gave them clear roles and training.

Initially the YCs were involved in interviewing practitioners that the school was considering working with, but it has grown from there. They decided that the YCs should observe the sessions being run by the practitioners so they could further develop their understanding about what skills a good creative practitioner uses. This has then grown in to involving the YCs in planning sessions with adults and researching how Studfall pupils like to learn. This practice is now expanding throughout the school with several teachers working through schemes of work with YCs.

To develop this creativity it has been essential to give pupils the space and freedom to make a lot of choices about their learning.

School council

The school council meets weekly to discuss issues that have come up in the class council meetings (also held weekly). These meetings happen during assembly time, so when one half of the school is having an assembly the other half is meeting in class groups.

Pupils were finding that not everyone was confident or able to speak up during class meetings, so they created two other methods for people to speak more privately to their representatives. Every Wednesday there is a school council surgery. There is also a suggestions box in to which people can either put anonymous suggestions or their names if they would like to speak to a school councillor, but not in front of the whole class.

Whole school involvement in writing the RAP

The school council has been involved in running a consultation on the RAP. Each week they asked all the classes in the school a different question related to an area of the RAP. Their responses have been fed into the RAP and also fed back directly to teachers. Pupils can see the effects in their classrooms and are very pleased.

“Some children were saying there’s not enough challenges at the start of lessons, so they were just sitting there waiting for all the other children to come in. So we talked to our teachers at their team meeting and we told them. And they took on what we said, and now we have lot more, so they’ve listened. Children are actually pleased.”

Year 6 pupil

Buddies

Everyone in the school has a buddy, Year 6 are buddies with Year 4 and Year 5 are buddies with Year 3. These are assigned when the new Year 3 join the school so that they have people who can show them around and help them settle in.

The buddy system extends beyond this though with students doing shared activities and lessons with their buddies and buddies helping one another academically. This relationship persists throughout their time at the school and the pupils clearly enjoy being buddied up, in fact they are arguing at the moment for more time to spend with their buddies.

About the school

The school is much larger than average. A few pupils are from a range of minority ethnic groups. A third of all pupils have special educational needs and/or disabilities which is significantly higher than usual. There is designated special provision for 33 pupils with statements of special educational needs and, together with those in school, they account for 10 per cent of pupils. This is exceptionally high compared to other schools.

The proportion of pupils known to be eligible for free school meals is below average. A breakfast club is organised by the school each morning for approximately 30 pupils. Two headteachers lead and manage the school.

Categories
Case Studies

School council and student voice case study: Lark Rise Academy

Here’s another great student voice case study. This time it’s from Lark Rise Academy, who use POW WOW sessions to get everyone involved in school decision making. Inspiring!

“If you do this now, at this age and you get this empathy it can only make them better citizens.”

Headteacher

Key benefits

  • Improved confidence, decision-making skills, empathy and entrepreneurialism in children across the school, not just a small group.
  • Greater and deeper understanding of what is improving learning in the school.
  • Improved engagement of parents with the school.

Top advice

  • Create a process that regularly and systematically gathers the views of everyone in the school and feeds back on progress.
  • Try out and evaluate new models of engagement. Always assess what you are doing.
  • Ensure that staff are empowered at the same time as pupils. Pupil voice is not an add-on, it is part of creating distributed leadership throughout the school, so the whole-school community needs to be heard.
  • Make sure that the issues discussed are important to the pupils. These tend to be things that are local and where they can see immediate impact. What happens in their classrooms and the playground fit the bill very well.

Methods used

POW WOW sessions

Pupils were finding that although the school council was effective by some measures, it was not genuinely representing all pupils. They were keen to find a new structure that would allow all pupils to be involved in decision-making about what was going on in the school. They decided to hold weekly class meetings, which they call POW WOWs. These 30-minute meetings are facilitated by the class teacher and minuted by the teaching assistant. Every class in the school will discuss the same questions, which are generally set by the headteacher. These questions tend to focus on the curriculum. This gives pupils real input into the core business of the school, learning and teaching and gives the school great information on which to evaluate what is going on in classrooms across the school.

Sometimes these are questions where the outcome will be a whole-school change, but often they are to do with what each class has been learning, how their classroom will be laid out, etc. The issues that most animate the pupils are those that affect their lives in the classroom or the playground.

Every pupil in the school is involved in POW WOW sessions, including the three-year-olds in nursery. All of their answers are listened to and noted down. This is not simply a matter of expressing preference though. Children throughout the school are asked to think about and justify their answers. This justification is very important as it enables deeper thinking about learning and forms the basis of genuine discussion. It is essential to all age groups that once the information is collated that feedback is given to them so they can see the effect of their discussions.

“Both my children needed prompting to speak, but they’re all asked their opinion and never made to think that what they say is silly.” Parent

“Everyone is given value and made to feel important. It’s helped my daughter to develop her own voice.” Parent

Community ambassadors/Play leaders/Eco-warriors

Through the POW WOW session pupils have established a number of roles whereby some pupils can take on extra responsibility:

The community ambassadors are an elected group of pupils who fulfil the roles that might be associated with a school council, but are not covered in the POW WOW sessions: interviewing prospective staff, giving guests tours of the school, representing the school at local and national events. They meet with a member of staff every Friday to share ideas for how the school can improve and decide who will get the Kindness and Caring Cups. The Community Ambassadors make their decision without knowing the name of the nominees, just what they have been nominated for.

“Ambassadors make our education better and the school funner.” Year  Ambassador

Play leaders look out for pupils in the playground who do not have anyone to play with. They also teach new games to any children who want to learn.

Eco-warriors is a club open to anyone with an interest in improving the environment. One of the methods they use is ‘Freddy the Frog’. Freddy is stuck in various places around the school where things need to change to improve the environment. This focuses attention and starts debate.

Leadership programme across the school

To ensure that all pupils can develop their leadership skills, not just those involved in the groups above, a new scheme has been started to provide recognition for pupils taking a leadership role. Pupils earn stamps for designing and carrying out a small leadership project. Collecting these stamps allows them to take on a special title in the class. These vary across the school to reflect the level of leadership activity the pupils are expected to take on at different ages:

  • Nursery: Teacher’s Helper
  • Reception: Class Leader
  • Key Stage 1: School Leader
  • Key Stage 2: Community Leader

It is totally voluntary and pupils can do almost anything that sees them taking a lead – there are some suggested activities for those who want to take part but are not sure what to do. One pupil made an Easter basket at home and then showed other children how to do it, so they could take Easter baskets home for their families. This kind of activity would have been run by a teaching assistant, so with more people leading activities there are also more activities for those who do not want to lead to be involved in. This is part of an action research project for a member of staff (see below) and the POW WOWs have deeply influenced how it looks. They discussed these questions before the scheme was set up:

  • What are you going to do to get stamps?
  • Would you like to take part?
  • What would you like the names of the roles to be?

The scheme is already proving to be very popular. It helps pupils to understand that leadership is not necessarily top-down, it can just as well be bottom-up. It also gives pupils entrepreneurial and decision-making skills and experience of working with groups and speaking to an audience.

Action research

Many staff in the school, from the headteacher down, have been or are carrying out formal action research around pupil voice and engagement. This has encouraged them to really examine what is working in their school and to try new things. It also gives them a rigorous framework within which to experiment and assess what they are doing.

In all cases the views of the pupils form a core part of the data. So pupils have yet another avenue through which to feed in to the school’s policy and practices. As well as giving all staff deeper insight into their practice this research forms part of additional qualifications for those staff carrying it out.

About the school:

Lark Rise Academy is one of the first schools to convert to academy status under the new rules.

It is average in size. Pupils come from a wide range of backgrounds, although the percentage known to be entitled to free school meals is below average. Children begin school with standards that are broadly in line with those expected for their age. The percentage of pupils coming from minority ethnic backgrounds is below average, and of these, very few speak English as an additional language. The percentage of pupils with learning difficulties is below average. However, the percentage with statements of special educational need is higher than usually found.

The school has a number of awards.

 

Involver conducted these case studies for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner in 2011, as part of a project to encourage schools to involve their students in decision making

Categories
involver blog News

Pupil voice is needed for Haringey school improvement

Haringey Council Leader, Cllr Claire Kober
Improving schools should be fun, maybe if she involved pupils Haringey Council Leader, Cllr Claire Kober wouldn't look so glum.

This week Haringey Council Leader, Cllr Claire Kober wrote an open letter to all Haringey parents and guardians about what the council is doing to sort out the mess that is education in Haringey right now.

I am one of those parents. My daughter goes to the Willow School, round the corner from where we live in Tottenham. I am also a community governor of Welbourne Primary School  (which is round the corner from our office) and I sit on the Haringey Governors Association (HGA) Executive Committee and the Schools Forum. I also volunteer my time to support Haringey’s school councils.

Cllr Kober is launching ‘Outstanding for All’ a commission “charged to consider the future of education provision in Haringey” with the aim of understanding “how all our schools can make profound improvements in their attainment”. Between her letter and a message sent to the HGA Cllr Kober made it clear that she wants the commission to talk to parents, teachers, headteachers, governors and local businesses. Fatally I think she has missed out the group she identifies as being “the most important people in any discussion about education”, the students themselves.

It seems that this process is in danger, before it even starts, of seeing young people as merely ‘outputs’ and data points rather than as central to the discussion and any solutions. Where this leads is to an education system that is not about inculcating a love of knowledge and an enquiring mind, but simply about learning to pass exams. This process switches off people’s ability to problem-solve, be innovative, creative and enterprising.

Cllr Kober would do well to visit Wroxham School to find out how they went from being in special measures to being outstanding (and have maintained it). Their attainment has gone up, but they would describe that as a side-benefit, rather than the driver or goal. They turned their school around not by focussing on attainment but on the community, including the children; they use their experience, insight and ideas to make their school successful.

I should point out that these are my views as a parent, governor and educator, I am not seeking to represent the HGA, Welbourne or the Schools Forum.

Categories
involver blog

School councils in the Czech Republic

We’re just back from a week in Prague helping to train school councils link teachers from schools across the Czech Republic. The words “Žákovské parlamenty” are very important to us now :)

We worked with a GREAT organisation called CEDU who support school councils over there. Having showed Kamila and Tomas from CEDU school councils from around London a couple of years ago, it was lovely to do the return trip.

CEDU have been supporting a number of schools across the Czech Republic to set up and maintain effective school councils.

They had put on a three day course for teachers from 13 schools across the whole country. Three teachers came from each school, including a head teacher – great commitment from the staff. Our contribution was to give a one-hour presentation on how school councils work in the UK, and to deliver a couple of  training sessions for the 40ish teachers (number not age).

Things I learnt in Prague:

  • The obstacles that school councils face in the Czech Republic are remarkably similar to the ones that we face in the UK.
  • Training through a translator is difficult but a good challenge.
  • Prague is an amazing city and rabbit hearts taste really good.
  • Jackets from Top Man don’t keep you warm in -20 degrees temperatures.
  • If a teacher offers you a green drink with cream on the top in a Czech bar, don’t drink it.

Things we did: 

Anyway, we started the trip with a visit to a local primary and secondary school called Táborská. After a lovely tour of the school (which you can see here, we sat in on a school council meeting which was translated brilliantly by one of the students, Max. Their school councils is called ‘3 Oko’ which means ‘Third Eye’.

The school council were talking about having a bigger role in supporting learning for younger students and working closely with teachers. It was a really useful start to see a school council meeting.

The next day was the first day of the conference. We had the amazing Honza as our official translator for the training – he was quick, concise and knew his stuff on participation. The whole week was a lot easier because of Honza – thanks!

After some warm up exercises, and three of the teacher participants turning up in traditional Moravian dress (plus shots of slivovitz for everyone!), Tomas gave an update on the programme. We then gave a speech (through Honza) on school councils in the UK.  You can see this below; though the fonts are a bit messed up.

It became clear that the obstacles to effective school councils were very familiar to the Czech teachers. Around half of them had been involved in the CEDU programme for two years. They were also very interested in the students being excluded in UK schools, which doesn’t seem to be as common in the Czech Republic.

To give us a flavour of some of the student voice work they’ve been doing, the teachers each gave a short presentation on what their students have been up to. Here’s one of the presentations (you can see a few more here):

The next day we delivered two workshops to the teachers aimed at helping them to overcome some of the difficulties they were having with their school councils. Asher sensibly suggested that the workshops should be in Czech so that the teachers could share ideas, with Honza translating things back to us. This worked out well, and there was a sigh of relief from the teachers when they didn’t have to hear everything in English.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a really interesting day, and many of the teachers had made really good progress. We helped them to support one another, and chipped in with our own advice too. I found it difficult not to be able to support the teachers once they were in small groups though, due to the language barrier – often that’s when you can go into more detail and give some tailored support. We did out best though, and the teachers seemed to get a lot out of it.

After a lovely end-of course celebration, and some exciting discussions about future collaboration, our trip to Prague came to an end. I also did a short interview  on Prague radio. If you can’t speak Czech, it’s probably not worth clicking :)

And if you’re interested, here’s the programme that we ran:  involver session outline – Prague Feb 2012

So we’d like to say a big thank you to the CEDU team: Tomas, Kamila, Karel, Filip, Honza, Jaroslav and Eliska. You were amazing hosts and we’re very grateful. A massive thank you to all the teachers we worked with too!