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:
Just before half term I ran a training course for ASCL (the Association of School and College Leaders), as part of this we collected together a wide variety of student voice activities that the participants had come across. We also highlighted a number of issues that could come up in trying to implement these schemes.
I thought this was a great collection so I’m sharing them with you here. Please add any other ideas in the comments and I’ll add them to the mindmap.
To see the whole mindmap (it’s pretty large) click on (in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
To see the whole mindmap (it’s pretty large) click on (in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
Student Voice Ideas and Issues
+– Behaviour
+– Support
Conflict resolution
Target setting
Buddies
+– Monitoring/enforcement
Student Panel
Prefect System
Prefect system based on school council
‘Self Government’ responsible for rules
+– Policy-making
Code of Conduct
Setting class groundrules
Linking local community to school council to deal with after school issues
Head boy/girl oversee prefect system
Rewards and sanctions group
+– Issues
+– Due to structure
Involving all students
Power
Money
Time
Influence
Succession
+– Fears
Is it democratic?
Censorship required?
Getting a representative group
Getting responses completed and handed back
Pleasing everyone
Unsupportive colleagues
+– Individuals’ ability
+– Lack of training
Staff
Students
Making decsions
Planning issues
Confidentiality
Realistic/appropriate ideas
+– Perception issues
Seen negatively by other students
Pupils not on council/identified by badges, ties, etc. might feel they have less influence
Getting people to recognise the importance
+– Teaching and Learning
Pupil interview panels
Students to reseacrh attitudes to learning
+– Peer support
Peer assessment
Peer mentoring
Peer tutoring (reluctant readers)
Student academic mentors
+– Formal student evaluation
Student SEF
Faculty reviews
Insted (student Ofsted)
Lesson observations by student council
Reviews
Student observers
Students observing rooms focussing on noticeboards and levelled work
+– Informal student evaluation
Learning walks
Discussion on T&L
+– Student planning and teaching
Students teaching G&T lessons
Numeracy, literacy and sports leaders
Curriculum planning
Ambassadors for different subject areas
Sports ambassadors
+– Environment
+– Eco
+– Reducing carbon footprint
Students approached governors and got £500 to kick off project
Campaign to use both sides of paper in ICT
+– Eco council
Huge electricity bill
School eco bag
Sustainability
Recycled stationery shop
Eco bags competition
+– Built environment
Surveys
Students designing toilets in BSF
Changing the building
Environmental group (outside spaces)
+– School environment
Sub-committees
New uniform put in place by school council
School improvement
House leaders recognised through their tie and jumpers
Fund raising for school council to meet objectives
+– Relationships
Appointments
+– Leaders wristbands
Community
Befriender
Attender
+– Fund raising activities
Enterprise
Anti-bullying (FAB)
Good Citizenship Awards
+– Peer mentoring
Bullying
Advisors
Student website
Council target setting using SMART targets to measure success
Essentially they pull out a few examples of bad or questionable practice of involving pupils in the interview process and from there draw the conclusion that pupils shouldn’t be listened to. So the NASUWT has found a few examples of where schools appear to have managed the process badly and so want to ban the process completely. I’m suggesting a different approach: get schools to manage the process well.
I’ve worked in many schools where they’ve found the process invaluable because pupils give them a different perspective on the candidates. Most of them use a process something like this:
Write down the process and responsibilities and share with all involved, including pupils and prospective candidates (i.e. put it in the application pack).
Get together a representative group of pupils, explain the process to them, including how much weight their views will be given. This maybe your school council or a group s/elected for this purpose, but here we’ll assume it’s the school council.
Get the school council members to go to other classes in the school (how many depends on the role being applied for, for a Head you may want them to go to all classes):
Discuss, ‘what makes a good Head/Deputy/Teacher/etc.?’
Each class should decide on the top 3 qualities/skills.
These should be recorded by the school council representative.
The school council should be given training on:
Confidentiality
Active listening
Open v. Closed questions
Leading questions
Questions candidates might ask
The school council then discusses:
What the other pupils have said makes a good Head/Deputy/Teacher/etc.?
They choose the most important of these.
What questions would you ask to find out if someone had each of these?
What sort of answers would be good or bad?
This list of questions is then drawn up along with a marking sheet for each of the questions/qualities.
Setting up the pupil panel:
The pupil panel is separate to the adult panel (ideally there should be no other adults in the room, where safeguarding good practice allows).
One student is nominated as the chair.
The pupil panel is not a ‘weeding out’ stage.
Candidates are encouraged to ask the pupil panel questions to ensure this is a two-way process.
As in formal interviews each candidate is asked the same set of questions. Each member of the pupil panel writes comments and marks on their marking sheet. After each candidate has left pupils discuss them and come to a joint conclusion. These are written down and passed to the adult interview panel.
The pupil panel meets with the adult interview panel so the adult panel can ask for clarification or explanation of the pupil panel’s findings.
The adult interview panel makes the decision on who to appoint. Giving whatever weight to the pupil’s views they feel it merits. If they wish to they can question the pupil panel on how they arrived at their decision.
The application process is evaluated so that it can be improved for next time:
Discussion with school council about how it went: did they ask the right types of questions; did they get the kinds of answers they were expecting, etc.?
Where possible, discussion with candidates about how they felt about the process.
The benefits you’ll get from involving pupils in the interview process:
A wider variety of perspectives on candidates.
Candidates get a different view on the school.
Pupils learn something about what makes a good teacher (and how hard it is to be one).
You might learn something about what pupils value in a good teacher (I’ve never once seen the answer, ‘a pushover’).
Pupils learn about how interviews work, useful knowledge when entering the work force.
A good starting point for relationships between pupils and a new teacher.
It says that your school has pupils as its focus and that’s what you expect of your staff too.
And here are a few other people’s views on the benefits of pupils’ involvement in the interview process:
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.
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!
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:
Ice breakers (4 school council-related games)
Boundaries and possibilities (2 different types of activity to explore what these might be)
School Councils are the end, not the beginning (presentation – hopefully it makes sense)
(Updated – April 2010) Planning elections
Key lines of communication (a worksheet for planning communication)
School policy on pupil participation (an essential document for any school that’s serious about pupil well-being – this is a guide to creating one)
School council constitution (you can’t really have pupil representation without one – although many try – some scenarios to set you on your way)
Tips for great meetings (guides to help you through preparing for a successful meeting, the meeting itself and ground rules to avoid pitfalls)
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:
I’m back in London, via Vienna, after an amazing time in Kosice, Slovakia. It was a very inspiring and interesting three days.
Great to hear about the challenges, successes and stories of people in other countries who are broadly trying to do the same things as us in the UK. Great to meet so many motivated, passionate young people. Great to visit Slovakia for the first time – it is a beautiful country!
After the first day of the meeting, with a visit to the school (See pic) , the rest of the trip focused on evaluating the ‘It’s your choice, use your voice’ project.
It was down to business in the amazing venue in Kyask – a beautiful old Soviet recreation centre for young people, set in the hills outside Kosice. A perfect place to work and think! The project had linked and compared school councils and youth democracy across Slovakia and Italy. It included training, conferences, seminars, youth exchanges, and supporting school councils to link with each other, and with regional councils.
A number of common obstacles were identified:
problems with elections
lack of youth motivation
lack of joined up thinking from local government
adults who are too willing to lead instead of facilitate
It was useful to provide my point of view on these obstacles as we went along, making clear how familiar they are to us, and discussing how best to overcome them.
Their main idea is to present the evaluation of the project in a way that will convince other young people to get involved. To pass on their learning to others, to help motivate young people – to make them ‘involvers’ I guess. Together, everyone put together a clear plan on the publication to convince other young people, which I’m sure will be a success – using some very eye-catching design. It will be translated into English, Slovakian and Italian, so I hope we can put it up on the involver site when it is done.
Italian group presenting their ideas
There were also lots of ideas for further cooperation that we hope to get involved with. I gave information on what Asher and I are up to with involver, and signposted resources and ideas which could help everyone in the future.
I think I’ll be going back in November – hopefully with Asher this time – to do some training, which is very exciting. The Kosice region is setting up their first regional school council.
Democratic youth voice on this scale has never happened before, so it’s amazing to be involved. There is also a possibility of some training in Turin to help with their regional school council in February next year – we would love to be involved in this too.
Both opportunities are very exciting – especially because it would give
me the chance to catch up with my new friends. Sooooo cheesy (sorry).
So thank you Michal and Erika for inviting me to take part, and thank you to all the young people who took part (especially for the Slovakian ‘mineral water’/ and the (many) Italian songs from Napoli). A great experience.
Over the course of the three days, I took short videos of some of the young people present asking them why student voice and school councils are important to them. I’ll put up a new one every day for the next week or so. Thank you to those who took part in this – your English is great! Here is Veronica from Slovakia telling us about her role in her school in Kosice:
(in the middle at the top), this will collapse all the levels. Then click on the little plus signs on each ‘node’ to expand it. The whole map can be dragged around too. (If this is just too complicated there’s a list version underneath)
