InvolverLots of schools are beginning to think about training their school council, or student voice groups, for next academic year.
If you want to make your student voice READY, then get in touch! You can read more about our training here.
It might be two days training to breathe new life into your tired school council, a staff INSET on student voice, or a half day workshop supporting students to be on an interview panel. Whatever it is, all of our training aims to make student voice:
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:
The Albion High School in Salford (Manchester) had a problem with its school council, as in many schools it was seen as ineffective and so became very unpopular with students. Staff and governors set improving pupil voice as a key priority for the school. With help from Creative Partnerships they have rebranded and reconstituted the school council, which is now known as REGENERATE. It has a significant budget (£30,000) and members of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) provide direct support.
Having trained a number of Salford school council co-ordinators the other week I was invited to help run REGENERATE’s training yesterday – I was even billed as “Asher Jacobsberg: National Leader on Student Voice and Involvement” which was a bit of an ego massage! The day was opened by the Chair of Governors and the Headteacher, which I feel was really important for them and the students, really creating a link between the key decision-making bodies in the school. My role for the day, as well as running ice-breakers and rounding the day off, was to help the students decide on a strategy for getting the whole-school involved with REGENERATE. For me this always comes down to communication. The best way to start to pique people’s interest is to tell them about what you’re already doing, and encourage them to tell you what they think. Once that’s working, then they’re much more likely to want to move in to taking an active role.
So this is the session I ran with them, and we came up with a really solid communication plan at the end of it. Very importantly each element had someone who would be responsible for it, and a regular date on which it would happen. Some of the ideas that the students came up with and will be taking forward:
Download the session plan as a Word 2007 .docx file (192 KB)
Download the session plan as a Word 2003 .doc file (225 KB)
To download as a PDF use the link in the Scribd window below.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
This is brilliant: our first resource shared by a teacher and it’s an absolute corker! Chloe Doherty gave us this scheme of work she wrote for her year team last year. She wanted to get class councils off the ground as she recognised without them the school and year councils didn’t really mean much.
This resource has a series of lesson/session plans and a bundle of resources to go with them. Any resources not included in the download below (such as the Boundaries Cards) can be downloaded from involver.org.uk.
As this is a resource written by a teacher and used in her school, I’ve left it just as she gave it to me, other than putting it all in to one document and adding a contents page.
Print or download (’save’) this resource using the ‘More’ button.
Tutorial Activities Class Council SoW
Chloe wrote this last year when she was Head of Drama at Kingsmead School and a Year 8 form tutor. She’s now Head of Drama at Southgate School. She’s also my fiancée, so all my banging on about student voice and class councils obviously wore her down as she wrote and ran this without any help from me. She sent it to us through the ‘Upload‘ page and it was honestly the first time I’d seen it! I could get all gooey about how she constantly amazes me, but I’ll spare you that.