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Active citizenship needs to be at the heart of education

Yesterday was the final day to respond to the last bit of the Government’s consultation on its controversial and rushed reworking of the National Curriculum. We have been actively involved with the Democratic Life consortium which has been using this opportunity to campaign for the strengthening of the Citizenship curriculum. As well as contributing to Democratic Life’s response to the consultation we wrote a response on behalf of the Smart School Councils Community. We used the response submitted by involver, below, to reinforce what they both said:

We would like to reinforce the points made the coalition we are part of, Democratic Life, and our sister organisation, the Smart School Councils Community.  We are especially concerned about the omission of active citizenship in any meaningful sense. We wholeheartedly support Democratic Life’s suggestions:

1. The skills necessary for pupils to make progress in Citizenship must be made explicit in the revised programmes of study. Pupils should use and apply Citizenship skills whilst developing knowledge and understanding about the subject. Therefore Citizenship must ‘equip pupils with the skills and knowledge to critically explore political and social issues, weigh evidence, debate and make reasoned arguments, and experience and evaluate ways citizens can act together to solve problems’.

2. Active citizenship must be made a requirement at both key stages 3 and 4. The current reference to ‘community volunteering’ at key stage 4 is insufficient and should be expanded to include ‘social action’. At key stage 3, active citizenship is missing entirely. Citizenship without active citizenship is meaningless and key stage 3 should require pupils to be taught about, ‘ways in which citizens can work together to address issues in communities, including opportunities to take part in different forms of responsible and social action in the school and wider community’.

3. Key stage 3 is narrow and bland and does not address the breadth of the subject or provide adequate progression to key stage 4. Teaching about human rights, the international dimension, the exploration of identities and diversity in society and the ways citizens to contribute actively and opportunities for pupils to participate in social action should be included at key stage 3 as well as key stage 4. The proposed requirement to teach about ‘the precious liberties enjoyed by citizens of the UK’ is abstract and likely to be poorly understood and taught. If ‘precious liberties’ means teaching about political, legal and human rights and freedoms then it should say so.

4. If financial education is to be included then it should relate to the subject of citizenship rather than simply adding personal finance which is part of PSHE. Any ‘financial’ element needs to include how economic decisions are made, where public money comes from and how public money is spent. Without this broader context financial education will never move beyond the personal and is likely to be a badly taught ‘bolt on’.

We would also like to see the inclusion of the suggestion made by the Smart School Councils Community to replace the aim related to volunteering with:

“develop a sound knowledge and understanding of how their actions impact on others locally and globally
develop an interest in, and commitment to, playing an active role in community action and decision-making that they will take with them into adulthood”

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Student voice policy – 5 quick tips

An email I received from a teacher friend last week (name and school removed to avoid blushes):

hey

I’m revamping my department handbook and I’m at the policy section, i’d really like an amazing students voice policy but I know we are very medicore at it so

HELP

________________________________

??? ???
Head of Drama

Large London Comprehensive

My response:

KISS in concert Boston 2004
KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid - I know the picture's not that relevant, but it might help you remember the maxim.

Keep it simple. No more than a couple of sentences on each.

  1. Why is student voice important to us (staff and students)?
  2. What does this mean in our work (what influence will students have in decision-making and T&L)?
  3. What does this look like (list any particular activities that will take place – evaluations, students as teachers, etc.)
  4. How will we measure success (what are your success criteria, how and when will you measure them)?
  5. When and how will you review this policy?

So the whole thing should be no more than a page in your handbook.
I would obviously suggest you work on all of these questions with your staff and students.  A very simple way to do this would be to write down your first thoughts an d give them to groups of students and your staff to comment on.  This could be done online using Google Docs so people could see how others are updating it and many people can work on it at once.

Regards,

Asher

I think this would stand pretty well for writing a new policy for most things. What do you think?

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involver blog Resources

Leadership, codes of conduct and lovely honey

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LOVE + HONEY - Lemon Verbena Salt Scrub 400g - Hand-made from 100% natural ingredients - £7.50 - Contact Golden Co for Salt Scrub pre-orders

I ran a training session for the Golden Company on Saturday. They’re an amazing little social enterprise getting inner-city kids into keeping bees. I guess they’re really trying to address two problems: lack of constructive things for young people to do and the decline of the bee population in England (and World-wide). Anyway, they were great to work with and I thought I’d share the session I ran with them, with you.

They’d asked me to come in to help them create a code of conduct. We had agreed that this would entail looking at leadership as well. How we relate to other people is my favourite thing to train on, I guess because it’s the area in which I’d most like to make a difference. Ultimately what all of this is about is getting people to treat one another well. If that happens then all the other good stuff will just flow.

So for me the most important ideas to get across were:

  • Leadership is about a group, not an individual. One leads only because the others follow.
  • So, everyone in the group has to think about how they’re acting as they might become the leader at any moment,and not necessarily by choice.
  • Those who lead by example will lead better and for longer.

Part of the session was based on pictures I’d pulled from that day’s newspapers and magazines.  So reasonably at random I’d got the Pope, Hitler, the Chinese Army, Obama, Michael Jordan, Cesc Fabregas, David Cameron, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Dreda Say Mitchell, Ferris Lindsay, Craig Bellamy, Spike Lee, Muhammad Ali, Dame Mary Perkins and Nicole Richie.  There were several others too, that I can’t recall right now.

Much of our discussion though focussed on Craig Bellamy. He’s currently the Captain of Wales (at football) as well as playing up front for the Manchester City, the richest football club in the world. He’s arguably the best footballer Wales have (as Ryan Giggs has retired from international football). He’s also set up a charitable foundation in Sierra Leone with a considerable amount of his own money. He has what is often described as a ‘chequered past’ though, having hit an opposition fan, clashed with a Wales fan, allegedly attacked a team mate with a golf club and had several run ins with the police.  How does he fit as a leader, which of these things are relevant? My opinion is that they all are.

If you use this session, I’d love to hear which people you have the most interesting discussions around and what code of conduct you come up with in the end.

Use the ‘More’ button to Download (‘Save’) or Print the session out.

Leadership & Code of Conduct Training Session