Tag: school councils uk

I was reading through Gordon Brown’s big speech on education yesterday: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page19209 (I was a little surprised at the lack of full stops, but that’s not the main point of this post) I really liked the main thrust of his argument: that we get out of recession by making education better and fairer rather than cutting back on spending.  That said, I think he really misunderstands who schools are there to serve.  Well, maybe ‘misunderstands’ is a bit strong, but he does neglect the key group: pupils.

It’s amazing, compared to parents they’re hardly mentioned at all, and especially not as stakeholders in their own education. ‘Pupil’, ‘student’ or ‘young person’ features 20 times, ‘parent’ 48; more than twice as often.  Now, don’t get me wrong, the more parents are involved in education and schools the better, but this speech puts a huge amount of weight in what parents, school leaders and teachers can do to improve schools, but completely overlooks the fact that schools will only really improve when they engage their pupils in school improvement.  Alongside school staff, who has the best view of how a school is doing, and how it needs to improve?  Pupils.

Gordon says that he doesn’t want to just advantage the educated, able parents; but a system that relies on parents and excludes pupils will do just that.  It will be just those parents who lobby the school and LA in an effective way.  If we train up all young people to use their critical faculties in a constructive, collaborative and sensible way, then we can have a universal view of schools from a pupil’s perspective.

This would also lead to far more praise of the good work schools do, not just criticism where they get things wrong.  Ask any teachers you know how often a parent has rung up to tell them what a great job they’re doing, and then ask them to compare how many times they speak to parents with complaints.  Pupils, having a full picture of life in school can reflect on the positive and the negative, not just focus on the one time Jimmy comes home crying.

Well, anyway, rant over.  Hopefully Gordon Brown’s office are reading this post and writing his next speech without this big black hole in.  Now the rant’s really over.

Asher

Just been working on two exciting things, but very different things.
I’ve been proof-reading our first resource for pupil voice activities in an early years setting. It’s mainly about self-expression and empathy and I think it’s really nice set of lesson plans. It’s quite exciting for me both because it’s the first thing I’ve worked on for that age group and because it’s for an age just a bit older than my daughter. I love the idea her nursery/school might be using something I’ve helped produce. With any luck it’ll be available from our website next week.

I’ve also been contributing to a list of who we should invite to our reception in Parliament (to welcome our new CEO and say goodbye to Jess G).

Right now I think it’s time to make this blog look a bit better and se what wonderful WordPress apps I can pimp it out with.

Asher

The government has pledged £5.5million to help close the widening generation gap.

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Daisy

All of the sleazy stories about our politicians that have been coming out recently have got me thinking about whether there’s anything school councils can learn from this.

So let’s have a look at what we’ve got:

Smear campaigns

Missuse of expenses

 It’s easy to see in the first video how an announcement about policy is overshadowed by the allegations of impropriety. In the same way if your class, year or school council isn’t run in an open and transparent way, people’s mistrust or dissaffection with it can overshadow anything it’s actually achieving.

So how do these two issues relate directly to school councils? Well, let’s take them down to a school level. What would happen in your school if a member of the school council was found spreading unpleasant rumours on MSN about another pupil? What about if it was discovered that pupils running a healthy tuck-shop had been giving away food to their friends?

Now, I’m going to guess you had one of three responses:

1. A teacher would sort it out.
2. I don’t know, it’s never happened at my school.
3. We’d ask the school council.

I’d suggest that none of these is quite good enough, the reason being that deciding after the incident has happened isn’t open or fair.  As you’re setting up your school council you need to create a constitution and job descriptions that lay out what is expected of people and what will happen if they don’t live up to those expectations.

You don’t need to go into every detail of what is and isn’t acceptable, you might come up with a broad statement such as:

School councillors will always act in a way that makes the people who elected them proud.

If you do this you then also need to be clear who is going to make the decision on what is unacceptable behaviour – in my example, what might make people ‘not proud’. In a democratic system this would need to be the people who elected the person in the first place.

So a possible structure might be that if someone gives evidence to the school council of someone is acting innapropriately, the school council takes this evidence to the class that elected the accused representative. It is then for the class to decide whether they still want this person to be their rep, and if not who to have in his or her place.

There would need to be a clear process for this that the whole school was aware of. It would need to include how much and what type of information would be shared with a class. For instance, if someone had been saying unpleasant things about someone, you might not want to repeat the detail of what was said.

So, if you have a clear structure, well thought out and laid out for everyone to see, the whole school can have confidence that the school council is involving everyone fairly.

If your structure isn’t recorded in some way, when something does go wrong you may find that disenchantment with the school council grows quickly and is hard to shake.

Asher

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