Tag: pupil/student/learner voice

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involver blog Resources

Who decides? Student voice boundaries and possibilities

This is a great little session to do at the beginning of the year when you’re trying to figure out what you want your school council (or student voice more broadly) to get involved with.

I think it works particularly well when you have groups of staff and students in the same room and then get them to look at one another’s lists at the end.

  1. Download these cards and cut them up (each group needs one set): [download id=”238″]
  2. Split people into small groups. If working with pupils and staff together have separate staff and pupil groups.
  3. Get them to sort the cards as a group, discussing each one briefly as they go.
  4. You can ask different groups to do:
    • As it is now
    • How they think it should be
    • How they think pupils/staff want it to be (whichever they aren’t)
  5. Get the groups to look at one another’s cards and discuss any differences or surprises.

You can do this is a short session (15 minutes) but if often provokes quite a lot of debate, so it can easily stretch to 45 (15 minutes sorting and 30 discusing).

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involver blog

The new Ofsted framework will undermine student voice

The new framework for school inspections released by Ofsted today removes all pressure on schools to involve their students in self-evaluation and improving their own community.

When schools are being blamed for not connecting young people with their communities, a key tool that helped young people to see that their communities are what they make them, not something that happens to them, has been swept away.

Under the previous Ofsted framework student voice (and thereby the importance of students to the school community) was emphasised in three ways:

  1. Schools had to show in their Self-Evaluations Forms (SEFs) how they had engaged with and listened to students as part of their on-going strive to improve.
  2. Ofsted inspectors met with students who had been elected by their peers as their representatives (the school council).
  3. Ofsted wrote a clear, simple letter direct to students (via the school council) explaining the key findings of their inspection.*

All of these have disappeared.

All of them showed students that they had a stake in the school and their own education, they were not just raw material with which good teachers would make good grades and bad teachers would make bad grades.

Letter stating that Ofsted are on their way to inspect the schoolNow it has been pointed out to me that good schools will do this anyway and I’m sure they will because they’ve seen the benefits, but it’s about getting those other schools to try it so they also see the benefits. Showcasing and sharing good practice is important but it can never provide the same impetus for schools that feel too nervous or busy to try things that the carrot/stick of an Ofsted grading can.

Once schools do get over that first hurdle they see how teaching and learning can be improved, how pupils’ self-confidence and communication skills grow and how pupils come to have a greater respect for a community they feel respects them. One of the most positive things Ofsted did was help schools take that first step. I fear that the new Ofsted framework will further widen the gap between those students who feel their community listens to them and those who don’t. We will end up with schools that produce young people with high grades but no skills with which to apply them. No understanding of teamwork, compromise, respect or self-determination. That’s not to say that the schools that do actively encourage students to express their views, collaborate and be critical thinkers won’t also get high grades, far from it, but their students will have so much more on top of the grades.

So what could Ofsted do? Well, given that they’re not going to reinstate the SEF, they should at least do numbers 2 and 3 above. They should extend to students the system that they will be releasing in October for surveying parents; this will give a much more complete and detailed picture (as staff and governors will be spoken to directly). They also need to define far more carefully what they mean by ‘take account of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils when judging the overall effectiveness of the school’. But if they don’t act fast I think we will see a still nascent area of learning, student voice, disappear in many schools and with it any constructive way for many students to feedback on, engage with and improve their schools.

* This was also published online and I bet it was pretty useful to many parents too, as it was much easier to read than the formulaic, lengthy and jargon-heavy main reports. Have a look for yourself (the letter to the pupils is at the bottom): Welbourne Primary School Ofsted Report 2009

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involver blog Resources

Out of the toilet and in to the classroom

Working with primary school councils in Oldham and Haringey over the last two days I ran in to the same issue that so many schools and their councils struggle with: can we get beyond talking about the toilets?

The simple suggestion I gave to them is to split their School Council in to Action Teams. This ensures that their school councils look beyond the physical and start to deal with all the things that are going on in their schools. We find these Action Teams cover most aspects of what goes on in school:

Learning

 Learning
  • Helping everyone to enjoy learning
  • Trips
  • Bringing people in to the school
  • What happens in class

Relationships

 Relationships
  • Helping people have fun
  • Stopping bullying
  • Making school friendly

Fundraising & Events

 Fundraising
  • Finding out what needs money
  • Making money
  • Putting on competitions, shows and special days

Environment

 Environment
  • Saving energy
  • Recycling
  • Making sure the school looks good
  • Getting fun equipment

Communication

 Communication
  • Letting people know what’s going on
  • Getting ideas
  • Assemblies
  • Website
  • Noticeboard

If you just want to have four Action Teams you could miss out Communication, but then you need to make sure all other groups share responsibility for this and report back on their communication each time.

So all items brought up from class council meetings, suggestion boxes, from the school council blog, etc. get allocated to the most appropriate Action Team by the Chair and Secretary (with support from the Link Teacher if they need it). The Action Teams then need to meet to discuss those issues and figure out which ones they can take action on (if nothing has been suggested for an Action Team, they need to seek something out). These actions are then what is taken to the full School Council meeting for ratification. You could fit in this extra meeting by replacing every other School Council meeting with Action Team meetings or by having the Action Team meetings for the first third or half of the time allocated for the School Council meeting.

The school council meeting becomes a way to co-ordinate all the pupil-led activities and to check that no actions will adversely affect any pupils. So it has a standing agenda of:

Item Person Time
1 Apologies (from people who can’t make the meeting) Secretary 1 min
2 Check last meeting’s minutes (to make sure they’re correct) Chair 2 mins
3 Learning Action Team

  • Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
  • What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
 LAT Chair 5 mins
4 Relationships Action Team

  • Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
  • What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
 RAT Chair 5 mins
5 Fundraising and Events Action Team

  • Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
  • What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
 FaEAT Chair 5 mins
6 Environment Action Team

  • Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
  • What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
 EAT Chair 5 mins
7 Communication Action Team

  • Report on actions from last time (matters arising)
  • What we are going to do this time (for agreement)
 CAT Chair 5 mins
8 Any other business (A.O.B.) Chair 2 mins
9 Date of next meeting Secretary 1 min

This way the meetings should be focussed on action, should discuss more than just what colour to paint the toilets and be quicker – as the reports are not for in-depth discussion, just for ratification.

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Citizenship involver blog

Pathways Through Participation: lessons for schools

The excellent Pathways Through Participation project has just published its final reports (in summary and full detail). They’re really worth a read for anyone looking to improve participation in schools. Whilst their focus was on adults – what gets them in to active citizenship, what keeps them involved – the lessons they’ve drawn from it hold true for young people too.

I particularly liked these simple equations:

Why participation starts, continues or stops
Participation equations from Pathways Through Participation: Why participation starts, continues and stops.

It’s vital to remember that in a community as diverse as a school the motivations and triggers will need to be many and varied to engage a wide variety of students. Just having a school council isn’t enough. A school council that sees its role as ‘involvers‘ – as people whose job it it is to figure out what would involve other students – would be a great start. The role of the staff then is to add in the other part of the equation, creating opportunities and ensuring the resources are in place for students to take advantage of them.

Pathways Through Participation is a project of Involve (who are friends of ours, but we’re not related), the NCVO and the Institute for Volunteering Research. It was funded by the Big Lottery Fund.

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involver blog

Student Leadership Teams: is this the real student voice?

As the new school year starts you might be thinking about how to give student voice in your school the kick up the bum is desperately needs. Last year’s school council was a bit of a washout, wasn’t it? There was a lot of moaning, a fair bit of grumbling, that one idea that didn’t quite come off and then a whole load of prevarication.

If only the kids on the school council weren’t that negative, feckless bunch. It would all have been different if you’d had the school’s elite, the committed, quick-witted, leaders of the student body driving things forward.

So how do we get them involved?

How about creating positions with cachet, status and a rigorous process of selection? We’ll have advertisements, interviews, regular meetings and a place in the School Development Plan. We’ll call it the Student Leadership Team and give them all titles mirroring the Senior Leadership Team to show how seriously we’re taking them.

Now we’ve got a strong, confident student voice speaking directly to every department and to the SeniorLT. Sorted.

I’ve seen that thought process in many schools but I think it fundamentally misses the point of student voice. There are four reasons why schools need a strong student voice:

  1. Learning:
    • Skills: giving students the chance to learn skills of team work, negotiation, communication and project management.
    • Citizenship: for students to learn, through experience, about their responsibilities to create the community they want to be part of and what a democracy is, its potential, limitations and inherent compromises.
  2. ‘Well-being’: giving students constructive alternative routes to resolve problems and raise personal concerns.
  3. Evaluation: collecting the views of the school ‘users’ to see how they feel the school is performing.
  4. Obligation: the UNCRC requires that young people have some say in decisions that affect them. In Wales school have to have a school council and whilst legislation in the rest of the UK doesn’t require it, it strongly suggest that it should be happening.

So which of these does StuLT miss? Well, probably all of them if it is constructed as suggested above. The key element that’s missing is universality. If the reasons for student voice that I have given are valid it’s important that all students are involved in student voice. Choosing those who already do well and give staff the kinds of answers they want to hear does little for the majority of students. It also undermines your evaluation and attempts to meet your obligations.

So, am I against StuLTs? No, I think they can be a great way of tying students in to the decision-making processes in schools, but they need to be built on the democratic structures that exist (such as class and school councils), not undermine or replace them. The ideas about cachet, status, rigorous selection, etc. could – no, should – be applied to the school council. Make your election process demanding and informative. Get each member of the school council to take on a role on the StuLT. Impress on those standing the importance of their role.

StuLTs need to be considered as part of a whole school student voice plan. A plan with students, not the school, at its heart. A plan built around learning not school improvement. So every student gains the learning and well-being on offer, and all of their views form part of the school’s self-evaluation. School improvement will naturally grow from this.

So when you’re trying to redesign student voice in your school think about it as an educator, not an administrator. Start with these two questions and build from there:

  • What do I want it to teach students about the world?
  • Which students do I want to learn this?

 

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Riots, discipline and student voice

I was involved in a short debate on BBC WM’s breakfast show this Monday. I was put up against Nick Seaton from the Campaign for Real Education, who campaigns against progressive education.

Have a listen and see what you think:

As with any interview like this no one gets the time they want to put across all the points they’d like to, but I hope I managed to get across: you don’t change people’s behaviour by repeating the rule, you change behaviour by getting them to understand the reasoning behind it.

The detail of what I was trying to say is best expressed in my post from last week: Old fashioned discipline is not what rioters needed