The whole idea of having an annual conference, for a whole day, where students elected to the school council explore issues to do with the school and learning, is a fabulous one. Any organisation worth it’s salt has an annual conference, and so if we take the school council seriously, so should we.

To be fair, the idea of having a school council conference wasn’t mine. It had already happened when I came to this school, and I arrived in Easter 2005 with very little teaching and a brief to “settle in” – I know any teachers reading will think “how supportive” (and it really was!) One of the things I was asked to do was get a grip on the Student Council.

I really believe that the consumers of anything will make that thing better if they have a real say in it, and I don’t think learning is any different (though in another circumstance I’d reject the idea of ‘consumers’) so I’ve a real conviction that student voice has a big part to play in school improvement and school performance. I am pleased that official bodies (OFSTED, DCSF, etc) have also recognised this in recent years. It also develops the students involved massively.

The difficult thing about student councils, which have existed for years, is to get students, staff, governors, and the outside world to take them seriously and to give them real power (I reckon that when I’m a head one of my madcap ideas is to stick an elected student on the Governing Body – maybe I’ll change my mind if/ when I get that far!)

Nonetheless, it’s newish that they’ve (as in students have) been, at least in words, given a voice that people say they take seriously.

Our student council has been fairly dormant for a few months. Part of that is my fault – a bit of lethargy has crept in. Part of that is down to a couple of the central members becoming older and focussing on exams, and part of it is that the school has had other priorities. Nonetheless, I’m up for it again!

This was a new student council, elected by year councils, which were elected by forms. There were three students from each year group though we left the Year 11 students at school because they’re about 70 school days from their GCSEs.

Our conference kicked off with a break-the-ice game. I actually copied one Robert did with us at the launch of the Reflective Practice project. It sort of worked. The students started to get to know each other and one of our guests at the conference (more later!) In fact, I’d say it did work because an hour into the conference all the students (Years 7-10) were calling each other by their names; working with whoever they were put with and getting on like a team.

We then introduced ourselves, and then we had an around-the-circle discussion about how to make the student council relevant. Lots of things came out of that (I don’t have my notes with me) and all of them were eminently sensible and practicle, and I immediately remembered why I want the students to have a say – because it is almost always constructive and helpful.

The main points were that the students should write about what happens in school and year council meetings, so that other students are more likely to take notice, and they made the excellent point that our teaching, learning, experience, and even play is being encompassed by technology, yet we still feed back on meetings (connotation: boring) with the written word on paper (connotation: boring) so we need to break that cycle. They suggested a powerpoint or video made by students to disseminate what has happened in each meeting, displayed on a TV screen we have in our main hall so students will take interest.

Following this, we had a discussion led by a Police Seargant, responsible for Community Policing in the ward in which our school is. I was never a fan of the police growing up; I remember this was because of how I saw people treated when I went on a protest against vivisection when I was about 13. I know it affected how my mum saw the police as well. Since I’ve moved to and taught in London, I’ve developed a relationship with the police that is professional, but I’m still uneasy (I mean as a force, rather than as individuals). At the same time, I’ve assumed that a large number of young people just don’t like the police and feel stereotyped by them. According to the school council, I’m wrong. They were not happy with being ‘moved on’ when they felt they were doing nothing, but they said that the majority of Young People really appreciate a police presence in their area. One young person who lived on an estate said she felt a lot safer when she saw them. I was surprised and pleased by the response, and I know that the Police Seargant who came down was as well. Even better, he said he or one of his colleagues would happily attend any/ every school council meeting in the future to hear what students feel of the policing in that area. No matter what you think of the police, you have to appreciate that as a good thing!

We then had a break, and our other guest, a consultant working for QCA arrived. I led a session on the 21st century in schools, and basically asked students what they thought the person leaving our school ready for the outside world would be like. Is like. They split into groups (at my suggestion it was “two people you don’t know”) and came up with their visions – 4 of them.

As I would predict, they really focussed on skills, though they also did carry some baggage which I don’t think we can dismiss (one was effectively a list of the subjects they do and why those subjects should be important in the outside world).

We then tried to rank how well they see our school as teaching, or developing those skills, but that didn’t really work as a session and if I could do it again I’d do some kind of rank ordering rather than the RAG exercise we did. The exercise we did had students putting red, amber or green dots on their peers’ posters (of the person leaving our school ready for the ourside world) skills/ attributes/ knowledge of the person at 16 ready for the outside world, and the students just got excited by the stickers to be honest.

What was really interesting looking through the results was they were almost exactly the same as the Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills that QCA have published. There was nothing to add to them at all.

I think the PLTs framwork is downloadable here but I don’t have Adobe so can’t check at home. Anyway, we distributed this and the students could see how many of the skills they had come up with themselves. They then spoke about how they would define those skills, in better language than QCA – and I think they did a good job. I videoed it all. They then took the skills, split into groups (they suggested it should be different year groups and different people) and did a role play/ rap/ speech about each of the skills.

It was really useful to use as a starting point for addressing the skills with staff, governors and even SLT to be honest.

In the afternoon we did a session on happiness. Part of it was on what teachers do that makes them feel happy, and part on what areas of the school make them happy. Intruigingly, they didn’t identify corridors or break-times as making them unhappy (which other students had when a similar ‘happiness project’ was done several months ago) but they did identify several departments as very unhappy places (one was a real surprise) and another administrative place as unhappy. This was a surprise to me but not to the colleague I confided in when back at school. I suppose it’s no surprise to learn that students don’t like being spoken to rudely, no matter how rude they or (more usually) their peers can be!

Nonetheless, lots of stuff for us to work on – I now have to get all of that onto a powerpoint (with the student councils help) to disseminate to the students who they were representing!