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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

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Newsletters

Newsletter 5: Citizenship under threat

Hello from involver: newsletter number 5!

As I’m sure is the case for many of you, the start of the new school year has meant we’ve been so busy we’ve missed September. That’s why your September edition of this newsletter is arriving in mid-October, I know this will have thrown so many of you who base your working life around the publication date of this email :)

The attachment – our very magenta flyer

News: Citizenship education – is it for the chop?

There are rumours that the Coalition Government’s plans for a slimmer curriculum will involve getting rid of Citizenship. We believe this would undermine widespread engagement with the ‘Big Society’ and remove a key, active element of young people’s democratic education. We’ve joined Democratic Life to put the case for strong Citizenship teaching in every school. You should too.
http://www.democraticlife.org.uk

Resource: School council rep’s toolkit

This free guide is for new and prospective reps, whether they’re class reps, year reps or members of a local youth council. Its got tips and ideas on what makes a good rep, how to run meetings and manage projects. You can even download the original files to customise with your own school or LA logos and advice:
http://involver.org.uk/2010/10/school-council-reps-tookit/

Blog: Does a youth council have to look like a council?

Why do we assume that a formal meeting is the only/best way to run things? Most of us find meetings boring, yet we put young people through the same process. I’ve been working with a group of 15 year-olds to design something a bit different:
http://involver.org.uk/2010/09/does-a-youth-council-have-to-look-like-a-council/

Competition: Make a cool film and win equipment and a workshop with a top UK film director

Cut Films is a competition to get young people making films with, and for, each other about not-smoking. They have just launched this year’s competition with a deadline of 31 January 2011. For more information please see:
http://www.cutfilms.org

Training: New session on collecting information

I wrote and ran this session for Preston Manor High School in Brent about the benefits and problems with different ways of collecting views from your peers. They seemed to really enjoy it. Why don’t you give it a go and tell us if it works for you:
http://involver.org.uk/2010/10/school-council-training-collecting-information/

Resource: Help trial our Student Voice-o-meter

Building on our Simple Student Voice Audit Tool, we’ve built a more sophisticated way to see how loud the student voice is in schools. It’s student-led and is simple and quick enough it can be run in form time. We need a few schools to try it out for us though before we unleash it on the world. Let us know if you’re interested in getting this sneak peek:
info@involver.org.uk

Video: Pupil voice videos from across the web

We keep seeing great videos related to pupil voice, democratic education and school councils around the web, but couldn’t find a place where they’re all together, so we’ve created one. They’re great for CPD and to inspire your school council (or staff). Let us know if you’ve seen things we should add:
http://www.involver.org.uk/resources/videos/

Blog: Learner Voice: why bother?

Greg’s been asked to write a ‘thinkpiece’ for LSN’s magazine. He focussed on why learner voice (as it’s known in the 14-19 sector) is so important. Do you have anything to add?
http://involver.org.uk/2010/09/involver-thinkpiece-for-lsn-learnings-magazine-learner-voice-why-bother/

Resource: Find school council resources more easily

We’ve redesigned our resources pages so it’s now quicker and easier to find school council and student voice resources to download. Have a look and let us know what you think:
http://www.involver.org.uk/resources/
Hope to hear from you all soon,

Greg and Asher @ involver

P.S. If you think other people might find what we do useful and you’ve got a network, conference or event where you could give away copies of the attached flyers we’d really appreciate it. Just let us know how many you need and we’ll put them in the post. Thanks!

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involver blog Resources

School council training: collecting information

Picture of whole school assemblyTo be effective school councils have to be expert communicators. Often a lot of emphasis is put on public speaking, and out-going communication, but communication is a two way process and arguably how a school council collects information is even more important.

To help a secondary school in Brent think about how they canvass the views of their whole school I wrote this short, simple session.  They seemed to enjoy it and it helped them come up with some really useful ideas. Why don’t you give it a try and see if it works for you?

Download the session and resources: [download id=”222″]

Aims:

  • For participants to experience a few different ways of collecting information.
  • For participants to explore what those methods might be good for and what drawbacks they might have.

Age range: 11-18

Group size: 12-30

Time: 20-30 mins

Resources:

  • Notepad
  • Whiteboard/flipchart
  • Tables
  • Chairs
  • Pens
  • Marker pens
  • Paper stuck to wall
  • Room big enough for people to move around in.
  • Collecting ideas instructions sheets
  • Face-to-face survey sheets (x5)
  • Written survey sheets (x5)

Method:

  1. Before the session starts (I did this during the previous session), select 5 people who will be your ‘researchers’.
  2. Explain to each of them what they will be doing (give each of them an instruction sheet).
  3. Send each of your researchers to the area they’ll be working in.
  4. Split the rest of the class up and send them to
    • 1/3 to meeting
    • 1/3 to written survey
    • 1/3 to opinion wall
    • N.B. None to informal chat or face-to-face survey
  5. Tell them they’ve got 10 minutes to discuss/fill out surveys, etc.
  6. After 10 minutes bring them all back into one group.
  7. Ask each of the researchers to feed back their findings in turn.
  8. Also ask them how they found using that method.
  9. After each one ask the group to think about what situations it might be good to use that research method for.
  10. Write these up.

Add-on: Put participants into pairs, get each pair to decide on a question and a research method they will use in the next week.

Obviously you can add in other research methods, making sure you stick to the principle that they’re using the method to find out whether or not it’s a good method.

Download the session and resources: [download id=”222″]

Download the session outline and resources as Word documents (all of these are included as one download above):

  • [download id=”223″]
  • [download id=”224″]
  • [download id=”225″]
  • [download id=”226″]
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Common school council issues – with solutions!

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:

Meetings have gone flat
What can we do if our meetings have gone flat?

Need more support from senior staff
What can I do if I'm not getting the support I need from senior staff (e.g. given time and resources to run things)?

How to build on this year's success
Things have gone well this year, how do we make sure we don't lose that?

No time for feedback
What can we do if class teachers don't give reps time to feedback?

How to get better motivated people involved
The people on the school council aren't great at getting things done, what can we do?

Not being treated seriously by staff
What can I do if other staff in the school don't give the school council the importance it deserves/needs?
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Creating a communication plan for whole-school involvement

Thinking about communication, it's not just assemblies and noticeboards.
Thinking about communication, it's not just assemblies and noticeboards.

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.

As well as training, the day was used for making some structural decisions and voting in the Chair.
As well as training, the day was used for making some structural decisions and voting in the Chair.

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:

  • Visit primary schools to tell them about REGENERATE, show they will be listened to at The Albion and find out what they want The Albion to be like when they get there.
  • Use social networking sites to spread the word about what REGENERATE is up to.
  • Create a REGENERATE jingle for the radio show that they will be recording.
  • Make sure that the REGENERATE noticeboards are updated after every meeting, that they are in places where everyone in the school will see them and that they are funny and interesting to look at!

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.