Tag: representatives

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involver blog Newsletters

Newsletter 7: Getting more people involved in student voice

Hello from involver – newsletter number 7

Welcome to all our new friends and we hope all our old ones are keeping well.

Resource: 5 Tutor time activities to prepare for an election

This is a series of short activities to help get the whole school up to speed for an election. They’ll introduce key concepts about what democracy is, what the school council is for and why people should stand. As well as clear instructions, there are PowerPoints and handouts to enable every form tutor in the school to run them. Have a look:
http://involver.org.uk/2011/03/school-council-election-tutor-form-time-activities/

Campaign: Keep Citizenship strong

As I’m sure you’re aware there’s a curriculum review going on. This means both that there’s a threat to Citizenship in the secondary curriculum and an opportunity to strengthen it in the primary curriculum. We need you to add your voice, sign up to www.democraticlife.org.uk, but most importantly respond to the review formally. There is some advice here:
http://www.democraticlife.org.uk/curriculum-review/

Articles: The life of a gap-year student voice assistant

Over the last few months we’ve been lucky to have Little Heath School’s student voice assistant, Alison, writing a regular blog for us. Her latest post is on how to get more people involved in your student voice, really worth a read:
http://involver.org.uk/2011/02/how-can-you-encourage-more-people-to-get-involved-in-your-student-voice/

Training: Free teacher training from Amnesty

If you’re interested in finding out about what an Amnesty Youth Group could do for your school, there’s training in Manchester on the 21st of May.
www.amnesty.org.uk/teachertraining

Research: Student voice good practice

We’ve been commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (they know about commissioning) to collect good practice on student voice from across England. It’s great fun, but we’re having to work our socks off to get it done within the timeframe. We’ve been seeing some amazing things so far, and we’re sure there’s more to come. If you follow us on Twitter we’ll keep you informed of the best little things we see:
http://twitter.com/doingdemocracy

Resource: Coming up with ideas (for the Speaker’s School Council Award)

The Speaker’s School Council Award is a great scheme to celebrate what you’ve been doing with your school council. If you’re not quite sure what project you should enter, we’re creating a series of resources for Parliament to help you create a project, carry it out, keep people informed and evaluate it. The first one is here:
http://speakersschoolcouncil.org/resources

Thanks for reading!


Greg and Asher

http://twitter.com/doingdemocracy

http://facebook.com/involver.org.uk

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involver blog Resources

Tutor/form time activities to prepare for a school council election

Decisions and action illustration
"You should move that bloomin' great big box", "No, you should", "They should", "Or her"

I wrote these tutor/form time activities a while ago for a school I was working with in Coventry, not sure why I haven’t posted them until now. Often elections are just sprung upon a school without any preparation. No one thinks to explain to the whole school why they should choose to stand, or how they should choose who to vote for. What this ends up with is the same people (and the same kind of people) getting elected every year.

Each one of these short sessions leads people towards an understanding of why they should stand to be a representative, or what they should consider when they are voting.

Download the whole lot here [download id=”229″] or read more …

There are 5 sessions plus the election itself. They are all participative sessions, but the resources should enable any teacher to feel confident facilitating the sessions.:

A) What is democracy?
There’s more to democracy than just voting, it’s an ongoing process. It’s not about others making decision for you, it’s about you being involved in the decision.
[download id=”230″]

B) What is a School Council?
The kinds of things the School Council might deal with.
[download id=”231″]

C) How does the School Council communicate with the whole school?
Explain the structures of the decision-making and the School Council in our school. Explain about recall. Explain structure of form/tutor groups to Year/House council to School Council. and frequency of meetings.
[download id=”232″]

D) What is a representative?
What qualities are needed by a representative?
[download id=”233″]

E) How do our elections work?
The processes for nominating, standing and voting are explained. Explain terminology of closed ballot, etc. Explain that the whole year/house will be electing year/house reps to School Council from the reps who are elected as form/tutor reps.
[download id=”234″]

The eventual voting process is ‘blind’, by which I mean people vote for a manifesto, rather than voting for a person. The school this was written for originally choose to run their election in this way to avoid it being a popularity contest and instead base it on policies and ideas.
[download id=”235″] (PDF) or [download id=”236″] (Word)

Practicalities

You can run any of the sessions on their own, but I think they probably work best as a series.

They’re each 15 minutes long, but could usefully stretch if you had the time.

It says they are for ‘vertical’ tutor groups of about 20, but they should work just as well with larger groups and groups based on age.

Files

You can download all 5 activities (including instructions and all resources) here: [download id=”229″]

Or you can download them individually if you want:

  • [download id=”230″]
  • [download id=”231″]
  • [download id=”232″]
  • [download id=”233″]
  • [download id=”234″]
  • [download id=”235″] (PDF) or [download id=”236″] (Word)

Each download is a zip file containing:

  • Instructions (in Word and PDF format)
  • An (animated) PowerPoint slideshow illustrating the key points
  • PDFs Posters of the essential bits of the slideshow for those who don’t have a projector/IWB
  • Any worksheets (in Word and PDF format)

If you can’t download  zip files and need the files separately send me an email and I’ll get them over to you: asher@involver.org.uk

Categories
involver blog

We’re looking for a web design/development intern..

Hey all,

Over on the join our team page, we’ve got details of an internship we’ve got available. Please give us a tweet, email or call if you’re interested!

Or you could read the details below:

Web Developer/Designer intern

We’re looking for a web developer/designer intern to help us create a new community website for the young people and teachers that we work with. You might be a student web designer, or a recent graduate, that’s keen to build their portfolio and work as part of an exciting start-up.

Info:

involver are an award-winning social enterprise that help schools, colleges and universities to give students more of a say in their education. We help young people to see that democracy, participation and ‘taking part’ isn’t just for the clever or most confident kids, or those who give the right answers. It’s for everyone.

We’re two guys that set up involver just over a year ago now. We’ve won several awards along the way, but most importantly have trained and supported loads of really great young people in schools across the UK and Europe. We’re currently working on high profile projects with Parliament and the Children’s Commissioner, and we’re working hard to take involver to the next level.

Why are involver looking for an intern?

We’re looking for a web developer/designer to help us create a new community website for the young people and teachers that we work with.

What kind of person are we looking for?

We’re looking for a student web designer, or recent graduate, that’s keen to build their portfolio and work as part of an exciting start-up. We’ve got a site spec and think that something like ELGG, Drupal, Ning, or Buddypress can do what we want. We’re just really keen for it not too look and feel really generic!

To do this you’d need great CSS and HTML skills, and a little bit of PHP probably wouldn’t go amiss. Our assumption is that we’d build something on an existing platform (as mentioned above) rather than building the site totally from scratch. So if you’re an energetic and passionate web design student, or a recent graduate, get in touch!

Where are the details?

We’re based in Shoreditch, East London. But don’t worry, we don’t have funny haircuts (except Greg). We’d pay your expenses and sort your lunch out.

In terms of timing, we’re keen to be flexible. You might want to do a day a week for a few months, or do something shorter and more intensive. Or you might like to work remotely. We also adhere to CIPD’s Internship Charter, which you can read here.

Are we nice people?

Yes. And we make nice coffee.

What would you get out of it?

Hopefully, you’d get a great website as part of your portfolio. You’ll meet some good contacts. We’d be really keen to introduce you to the people we work with; a mix of schools, charities, politicians, government people, private sector companies. And take you to events if you want to come.

If you do a good job, we’ll also promote you widely. And give you a great reference. Finally, we’re developing more and more online work, so there’s also a good chance we’d give you paid work in the future.

What do you do next?

  • Get in touch with us at info@involver.org.uk.
  • Or give us a buzz on 020 3411 3294.
  • Or you might want to tweet us @doingdemocracy.

From there, we’ll organise an informal chat to decide if you’re what we’re looking for.

If you want a bit more information about what we do, take a look at www.involver.org.uk.

Or click on the link below for this information in PDF:

[download id=”227″]

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Resources

School council reps’ tookit

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:

[download id=”221″]

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involver blog

School council success: improvement or representation?

How do you talk about the success of your school council?

When people visit your school do you tell them:

(a) About how this great group has redesigned the uniform, carried out an in-depth study into learning styles, raised thousands of pounds and reduced the school’s carbon footprint to zero?

(b) How it has enabled students from across the school to work together, been a channel for frustrated students to be heard and made staff think about things differently?

Benito Mussolini
How do we judge politicians? On whether they 'make the trains run on time', or how democratic they are*?

Almost every school I go to tells me the (a) type things – and the problems they talk about are similarly about their inability to make visible improvements to the school. But, if I ask them what their school council is they will say it’s,

a democratic body of students, there to give the students a voice in the running of the school.

They very rarely say it’s,

a group of keen and able students who help the staff.

But more and more frequently I meet teachers who tell me they’ve selected a few of the people on the council ‘to help it work better – because some of the ones who got elected might struggle’, or even that they’ve done away with elections completely to make the school council ‘more effective’.

More effective at what?

What are the success criteria for a democratic organisation?

I would suggest that the most important is how well it involves everyone, not how well it involves the ‘right’ people. If you need to change the system to make it more effective this should be to make it more inclusive, not more efficient.

But if you’re going to change the system (and I think most schools need to), why not do both? Getting the whole school involved in identifying issues, coming up with solutions and taking action will result in far more changes and and wider engagement. Focus on spreading discussion and action to class councils, rather than pulling it in to the school council.  Use whole school meetings, have online forums and noticeboards that the whole school can contribute to, set up action groups that anyone can be on, set up ‘social action time’ when the whole school is supported to work on their own projects.

* Fascist dictator of the 1920s and 30s, Benito Musolinni is often claimed to ‘have made the trains run on time’, it may well be that even this achievement is over-stated: http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp

Comic about Mussolini making the trains run on thyme
Searching for images to illustrate this article I came across this comic. It made me smile, which then made me think that I am falling in to the 'dad' stereotype. Ho hum.
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involver blog Newsletters

Newsletter 3: Why bother, audit, training and fantasy football

Hello from involver: Newsletter number 3!

The summer break is almost upon us (or already here, depending on where in the UK you are), so we hope you’ve had a great year!

Here’s a round up of what we’ve been up to over the last month:

Blog: School councils and student voice: why bother?
Greg says, ‘I’m working from Scotland for most of this week, which meant a very long eight hour train journey! After a double espresso, I was feeling a bit reflective about some of the things that we’re doing with involver and why we’ve been doing them.’ Here are his thoughts:
http://involver.org.uk/2010/07/school-councils-and-student-voice-why-bother/

Training: Making your school council READY!
Lots of schools are thinking about how they can improve their school council or student voice next year – we can help you make it READY (yes, that’s an acronym, have a look here if you want to know what for):
http://involver.org.uk/2010/07/school-council-training-get-in-touch/

Resource: Great set of student voice resources from Australia
Asher came across this series of presentations and supporting resources, which was created by Nick Rate, a trainer from Australia. He’s recorded it all so the people he supports in far flung places down under can access them, but of course it means we all can, we love the internet:
http://www.jogtheweb.com/run/AlhYPd3PMcUd/Student-Voice

Video: Make Your Voice Heard: Discover Democratic Education
A great video from the States about why ‘doing democracy’ in schools is so important. It is included in the set above, but worth a special mention:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_LbZ3XcfK4

Project: Speaker’s School Council Awards 2011
After a hugely successful opening year, you can now register your interest in the Speakers School Council Awards 2011. It’s a great way to get your achievements recognised, so to get involved, hop over to:
http://www.speakersschoolcouncil.org

Evaluation: Student voice/school council progress this year?
How have you been getting on with student voice, this year? It’s not easy to get right, and it still takes work and support even when it’s a success. We’ve built a very short audit tool to help you reflect. Fill it out and we’ll even provide you with personalised feedback and ideas if you want us to:
http://involver.org.uk/participate/simple-student-voice-audit/

Network: A new Student Voice and School council Linkedin group
For those of you that use Linkedin (for those who don’t: it’s kind of like a professional Facebook), we’ve set up a group to connect and inform people about student voice and school councils. We’re still finding our way around LinkedIn, but our teacher friends tell us it’s very useful. So take a look, and join at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3089339

Networking-fun: Fantasy Democraball!
We’ve set up a fantasy football mini-league for our friends, colleagues and contacts, so please join and invite oithers.  You don’t need to know anything about football, just how to add up to £100,000,000. It’s a head-to-head league, so each game you’ll be playing against another person from the citizenship/student voice/youth democracy world (your skill in beating them will be a good ice-breaker topic for when you next meet them at a conference). It’s free to sign up. Once you’ve picked your team use this code to join the ‘Democraball!’ league: 116742-35727
http://fantasy.premierleague.com

So have a great summer!

And remember, if you want to get in touch about anything we’re up to, then please email us at info@involver.org.uk. We’re also always keen to hear about and share good practice, new resources or developments in student voice.

Greg and Asher @ involver