Engaging Student Voice - Report to GHFP July 09 - The Grubb Institute

8/14/2019 Engaging Student Voice - Report to GHFP July 09 - The Grubb Institute

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Engaging Student Voice AX673

Engaging Student Voice:A model for the dynamic empowering of students in school

A reflective report of a Research Workshop held at theInstitute of Education, London University, in March 2009,funded by the Guerrand-Herms Foundation for Peace.

The questions to be exploredA group of five school leaders from in and around London came together on 16March 2009 in a research workshop at the Institute of Education London. All fiveheads have all developed robust, effective and structured ways of amplifying thevoice of students so that their perspectives have been effectively incorporatedinto the direction these schools have taken.

They came together:

To find out what factors had supported their different initiatives

What obstacles they had encountered and

How those had been addressed.

Their intention was to discover what principles they had developed, largelyintuitively, between them. If such principles did exist, could they be reproducedin a consistent form for use by others?

The method was to explore their varied experience of issues about schoolleadership and the challenge of taking student voice and person-centred

education more seriously. The workshop was facilitated by John Bazalgette fromThe Grubb Institute of Behavioural Studies and Michael Fielding from theInstitute of Education.

ResourcingThe research workshop was majorly funded by the Guerrand-Herms Foundationfor Peace. Thanks are due to the Trustees for their generous support.

FINDINGSSupporting factorsIt emerged that there were 12 common positions from which these school

leaders personally worked and how they thought about what their students mightuse their school for. In each case they were backed in this by their leadershipteam. The key points are listed here with indicative comments (not verbatim)made in the discussion about what they all had in common

They all had a fundamental belief in the creativity of students and oftheir capacity to be responsible in applying their creativity to the work ofthe school.

The Grubb Institute July 2009 1


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Our students have been articulate and aware of their contemporaries as abody We have been growing what was there already in abundance buthad never been harvested before We are being led into looking atstudent voice as being about more than hygiene factors Our Year 8Researchers have stunned the staff with their wisdom and expertise.

They trusted students natural loyaltyto teachers and to the school.

We have found again and again that some of the most potentcontributions have come from those seen formerly as problem pupils.Trusting them has released new insights and understanding for us all

They saw students as co-creators of the work of their school, rather thanpassive consumers of what others provide. The effect of this was to pushthe envelope of the pupil role into new dimensions.

The students are the primary stakeholders of our school. Whatever the

efforts of the staff, what the school is and does in the end depends uponthe childrens efforts.

They had developed specific structures through which studentperspectives were brought to bear on the core processes of their school:evaluation of teaching and learning, behaviour and staff appointment.

We have a Teaching and Learning Panel, Consultation Panels, Researchand Development Groups, and Interview Panels for staff appointments We have a Task Force of Year 8, trained in social science research by a

method developed by the Open University, who investigate issues thatthe School Council identify as needing to be more fully understood.

This involved defining boundaries clearlyespecially in terms of task,territory and time; this was important in taking account of matters thatcould not be subject to student opinion because they related to statute andprofessional judgement.

I am clear from the outset that there are certain things that will not bechanged: these include the National Curriculum, finance and otherquestions, which could include school uniform. There has never beenany problem about this Defining boundaries clearly can guard againsttoken consultation, what passes for sounding student opinion but isactually doing a selling job.

All the school leaders showed determination and tenacity inmaintaining firmness of purpose in terms of the purpose of their school,holding to a wider and deeper understanding than is found in conventionalterms.

The focus is on the curriculum, but not just the subject content; ourstudents are interested in how pupils are treated It is scary how much



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they unearth; they are ruthlessly honest. We have to handle this withintegrity.

They had a capacity to develop new languages with which to explain toall the schools stakeholders the rationale for their leadership teamspurposeful decisions.

Just as Emotional Intelligence has brought new language to us, we arehaving to develop a new language to work with the students. They areworking in think-tanks, steering groups and so on.

They provided models for the practice oflistening to everyone, leadingdialogues about the strategic and tactical decisions that were being takento all concerned students, staff, governors and parents.

I walk the school and am available to talk to anyone, but they will only talkif they have confident that I am truly listening. - We have Associate

Governors, who the rest of the Governing Body find invaluable.

They are working with evidence at all times and expected that ofothers; this enabled everyone to test the validity of assumptions that laybehind decisions.

If we ask the students to work with evidence we have to set an examplein every decision we take. Decisions based on untested assumptions willsoon be exposed We have reviewed and tested the value of what weare doing. Not to have done so would have lacked integrity.

Consistently they recognised the need forexternal advice and support

in order to develop leverage which could bring about shifts in internalunderstanding.

We have used a team of four retired, experienced senior teachers whoact as consultants to the student representatives. They have provedinvaluable in enabling the students to go further with their own thinking. We used an external body to enable the SLT to equip us for thechallenges facing us once the School Council was really empowered bybeing backed by research reports.

It was important to locate champions of student voice amongst

students and staff; without these the voice of students could have beendrowned out and the process of succession through generations becomedifficult.

We were fortunate in the first year that we strengthened the SchoolCouncil and extended its remit and that the Head Girl was unusuallygifted and made the initiative work. We had a Head of Subject whoreally cared about student voice. He has made the approach work andwe have created a new role for him to take the thing further.



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They all recognised the importance ofopportunities of timing andconditions which had made the development of student voice feasible inthe school, including their own appointments.

It took me over two years before I could really get to grips with the issue.

The school just wasnt ready before that The governors had appointedme to take further work my predecessor had begun.

ObstaclesAll five heads encountered similar obstacles which they had to overcome. Theywere all struggling with one or more of them even after several years of releasingstudent potential through mobilising student voice. Nine obstacles wereidentified in all.

In particular, narrower conceptions of the schools purpose were heldby many other stakeholders, including some teaching staff and someparents. While these may be overcome initially, there was some evidencethat they might resurface again and have to be addressed once more.

A factor in this was that academic learning and performance in leaguetables were so often seen as the basis of judging the school, especially bythose outside the school such as government, the press and media butalso by others including some parents.

There was often a lack of confidence in students capacities and abelief that they could not desire the best for the school as an organisation.

In some places there was fear that the professionalism of teacherswould be underminedby entrusting new responsibilities to students.

Related to the above, there was sometimes an inability on the part ofsome to see the wider connectedness across the whole school with theworld beyond the classroom and outside.

There was always the possibility ofproblems of continuity: an initiativethat worked with one cohort of students might fall down because the nextgeneration could not engage with the opportunities offered them. Thesame issue also applied to staff.

There was a danger of falling into a tokenism: a School Council or otherdevice that appeared to draw on student voice could actually be a screenbehind which the intentions of adults actually prevailed.

A head introducing this kind of work had to help others face fear of theunknown.



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Some schools, especially those that were cruising in terms of academicperformance and might have a long history of success, experienced greatdifficulty in terms of changing a deeply embedded culture.

A pattern emergesEach of these heads seemed to share perspectives from which five principlescould be drawn:

They had a sense ofdynamic interactions with all other people intheir schools, which was person-centred. They wanted to know whatothers thought and felt about how the school was developing and baseddecision making on that knowledge.

They saw that the way they personally engaged as heads with theirstudents set a defining standardby which everyone else could judge

their own engagements with one another.

Significantly this included students, teachers and support staff, and alsoextended to parents, governors and others beyondthe schools gates.

They all made the assumption that students have a differentexperience of the schoolfrom that of staff and that the realisticdevelopment and direction of the school depended upon taking thatauthentic perspective into account.

They had a wider conception of the purpose of their school, beyondthe criteria by which they were formally judged by others. They tookinto account that learning in their schools was about: learning to belong;acquiring the knowledge and skillsrequired to have an effective life inthe adult world; the maturityto handle frustration and set-backs as well asthe courage to go into the unknown; and the vision to imagine whattransformation was needed to bring all that about.

A working modelReflecting on these principles an underlying dynamic could be outlined. Fromthem a practical organisational model was emerging, though not as yetarticulated. These were heads whose organisational thinking was based onprocesses, which structured interactions horizontally, not vertically.

Their core idea was that children are not simply consumers of the activities ofthe school, but in their role as studentsthey are the principal implementers ofthe heads and the schools policy. Thus these schools were working on thebasis that children were learning to develop allegiance to what the school is forwhich was possible because they were its co-creators. They were not simplybeing conditioned to be obedient to those set in positions of authority.



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The process diagram below embeds this horizontal dynamic across theseschools. This model is based on three key questions which apply toeveryone in the school, though those in different roles may generally holdgreater responsibility for taking action in specific areas:

Whyare we doing what we are doing (the leadership question)?

Whatare we actually doing (the managementquestion)?

Howare we doing it (the implementation question)?

MThe model shows how leadership can emerge dynamically from every level ofthe school. These headteachers as leaders were sensitive to how all threequestions interact with each other and that their leadership gained its livelinessfrom being continuously alert to those interactions. They thought of their studentbody largely but not exclusively as the schools implementers, workingcollaboratively with the teachers and tutors. In this way, the students are activestakeholders in the effectiveness of their school. Teachers and tutors take onmanagement activities with the students in the classrooms and elsewhere whichinfluence the schools effectiveness. These heads felt that for their own

effectiveness, they needed to understand the thoughts, feelings and otherevidence from the student population about what they were achieving in theirinterfaces with staff in classrooms and elsewhere: so they needed the outerarrows in both directions that linked Why?with How?

Heads also needed to know about the thoughts, feelings, experiences andeffectiveness ofstaff teams across the school, as well as what went on in thevarious engagements with the student implementers in classrooms, laboratories,



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gymnasia and playgrounds. This drew on evidence from staff team meetings asthemanagers of the schools policies, put into practice by the implementer/students.So the interacting/interfacing cycles, through which working at thequestions Why?and What?were put into action, were important to heads.

Head teachers, engaging with all the stakeholders of the school have theresponsibility to discern the purpose of the school why it exists and to createa design that most effectively achieves that purpose.

Implications and the futureThe evidence from this small research workshop suggests the viability of thisdynamic and interactive model and the way it illuminates how the ways in whichmen and women find, make and take their roles as headteachers stimulatechildren and young people to find, make and take their roles as pupils andstudents in the system of their schools.

Further work could include testing it further with a wider population. It might bethat it could be developed as a way of preparing heads to work authentically withstudent leadership. For the present, this report deserves a wide audience:suggestions about its circulation and publication would be welcomed.

Our thanks are due to the generosity of the Guerrand- Herms Foundation forPeace for their generous support and active interest in encouraging this body ofthinking in the interests to children in school.

John Bazalgette10 July 2009


Documents

Engaging Student Voice - Report to GHFP July 09 - The Grubb Institute