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Dr Kristyn Wise The British School Urca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
There can be no doubt that the moral and legal imperative to include children and young people in decision-making has exploded in recent years. Young people's participation rights are reinforced in virtually every piece of legislation and statutory guidance coming from central government, across the areas of education, health, and social services. The movement towards children's rights is also evidenced by the burgeoning number of professional workers in the field. Over the last five years CROA, the UK-wide network of children's rights and participation workers, has grown from a couple dozen members to more than 500.
It is largely the accumulated experiences of these workers, and of the young people who work alongside them, that inform my arguments in this paper about amplifying student voice. There are a number of common themes that thread through the experiences of many of these workers. There are some recurring and relevant messages:
This combination of factors means that, while everyone seems to be doing participation work, not everyone is doing it so well. My purpose in this paper is to discuss some potential reasons for the gaps between intentions and practice and to make concrete suggestions that might help to address the disparities.
With some outstanding exceptions, schools do not lend themselves easily to hearing the voices of students. This is obvious enough just from looking at the meanings of the words associated with schools. For example, you can highlight the words ' school ' or ' teach ' and look them up on your Windows thesaurus by pressing Shift + F7. Continue to click on some of the synonyms and, with one or two goes, you find that equivalent words become 'drill', 'inculcate', 'beat', 'discipline', and 'obedience'. We have undoubtedly moved on from the days of caning students, but these words are still some of the roots of our educational structures.
The lack of power held by school children is reflected in even the most basic layers of decision-making in schools. In England, for example, children and young people do not have any influence over the National Curriculum. They don't, strictly speaking, have any say in what school they attend. They have no choice about what to wear to school in the morning or about who teaches them when they get there. Above all, young people do not get to choose whether to go to school or not.
I have been immersed in children's rights work for a number of years now. A lot of my time and energy has been focused on developing young people's participation. Despite this, I am still somewhat infected by adultism. This is a belief that, as an adult, I must automatically know better than children what is good for them. Somewhere inside my head, I have a voice that tells me that I didn't have any power as a child, so why should this generation of children have any? That my years of experience on this earth must count for something. And that, ultimately, my judgment is to be better trusted than that of someone who has, after all, only recently learned how to tie his or her shoe laces.
Somewhat controversially, I believe that this adultist voice is likely to be louder inside the heads of teachers and other educational professionals, if for no other reason than that the whole teacher/student relationship assumes that one side has a lot of knowledge to share, and the other a lot of things to learn. I think that many teachers, whatever their politics or personal views about children, still believe, on some level at least, that children should sit down, get their books out, shut their mouths, and do what they are told. I think that it is a challenge for any adult to turn down the volume of the voices in their head well enough to hear what children and young people may have to tell them. I imagine that it might be an even greater challenge for people who are teachers.
In practice, this means that the biggest obstacle - perhaps even the only obstacle - to amplifying the voices of children in our schools is the often denied, but nevertheless deeply held, belief that we have little to learn from them. There are uneasy steps between the perceptions of children that are ingrained in our culture - and that are reinforced by educational structures and history - and the rhetoric of participation. But, in reality, the most overwhelming reason to amplify the voices of students is that they have many things to teach us. Children can teach us how to make the school library more effective, how to make a chemistry lesson more interesting, how to hire the best teachers or how to make a school more inclusive. In truth, the real experts about what does, and does not, work in our schools will be the children and young people who attend them.
The first, and undoubtedly the most difficult prerequisite to increasing the power of the student voice, then, is to believe, genuinely, that children and young people have something valuable to offer. This means working on the culture of the staff team and challenging adultism wherever we find it. It means talking about (the inevitable) resistance to student participation in staff meetings, and letting people talk about feeling threatened, while not allowing their fear to scupper the process. A precondition to this is acknowledging that increasing the decision-making power of children will create conflict, and that conflict can be positive.
Schools may not be able to do all of this at once or all of it by themselves. If a staff team truly believes that shifting the balance of power towards children will lead to absolute chaos, then it will take time and consistent pushing to budge the prevailing ideology. Experience shows that it is far from easy for adults to learn to repress their immediate, and somewhat natural, response of 'that will never work' and consider instead whether it might just be possible that the children are right.
The second prerequisite to achieving student participation is to convince the children and young people at the school that you mean it when you say you want them to have a stronger voice. Young people will not necessarily jump at the chance to get involved. They may have bad experiences of adults and of participation in particular. They may have been involved in any number of consultation exercises, for example, where their views were sought and then apparently discarded. Or they may have been on a committee to revamp the school uniform, only to be told at a later date that budgetary restrictions meant that no change was possible. Children and young people need to believe that there is a point to their participation.
Young people may also need other incentives to get involved. Food at meetings can be a good way to get children to come along. Paying young people for their time is controversial and difficult, but schools should consider how they can reward students who are doing work that they would ordinarily pay for. It can also help if schools actively celebrate the achievements of student participation, or if they facilitate the application of children's participation to schoolwork or other accredited learning. Above all, schools should invest the time and thought required to ensure that participation work is fun.
Most schools now have student councils, and these are probably the backbone to student voice in a school. In order for student councils to be meaningful, it is vitally important that they be given a sense of independence. This means that young people should be able to chair their own meetings and set their own agendas. The management team at the school may want their student council to look at their most recent Ofsted report, but they need to accept that the children may choose instead to develop a recycling scheme for the school. Young people need to be able to decide how they want their voices to be heard. Children will undoubtedly require some support and advice in carrying out roles of responsibility, but adults should avoid directing or censoring their work.
Young people can learn a lot of new skills by taking part in active student councils, and schools should therefore enable them to meet during school time. Student councils should have regular and direct access to the senior management of the school.
Not all of young people's decision-making power should be invested in its student council, however. Partly this is because you cannot create a culture of partnership with young people across a school by involving only a handful of students. But it is also the case that the most disaffected students at a school are often the ones who have the most relevant and powerful things to say. At the same time, encouraging the participation of these students can also help to engender their greater interest in school more generally. Here are some concrete ways to listen to the voices of the larger student population.
STUDENT NEWSLETTER. Let them run their own newsletter, and give them a budget to do it. Be clear before you start where the boundaries are, as this will help to avoid editorial arguments in the future. For example, you might together decide that slander, racism and homophobia make unacceptable content for the newsletter, but that the students can use the space to air criticisms about school dinners, uniforms, policies, etc.
CONSULTATION SURVEY. Ask for volunteers to run a peer-led consultation survey. Children and young people can design the questions and facilitate others taking part. They can collate the responses and present them, including recommendations, to the 'powers that be' at the school. Before you consult with the children at your school, it is crucial that staff are signed up to acting on as many of the messages as possible. Try to be clear with young people from the start about the impacts their views might reasonably have. The children and young people who take part in consultation exercises should be given feedback about what the school is doing to take their views into account.
TRAINING SESSIONS FOR STAFF. With some training and support, young people can also run training sessions for the staff team. Young people can deliver training on, for example, children's rights, young people's participation, positive approaches to behaviour, and talking to young people about sex and relationships. Many of these training packages already exist for young people to use as a starting point. Staff training that is delivered or co-delivered by young people can be more creative, relevant and powerful than training that is commissioned and delivered by external 'experts'.
RECRUITMENT & SELECTION OF STAFF. Children and young people can, and should, be involved in the recruitment and selection of staff, at all levels. Younger children can contribute by drawing pictures of their ideal teachers, and these can form part of person specifications. Children can also design recruitment adverts. Schools can run competitions for the best interview questions for a new head teacher. Older young people can participate as equal members, with equal votes, on interviewing panels. In order for this to be effective, young people need to be trained on questioning techniques, equal opportunities legislation, etc., so that they can take part on an equal footing with the adults. Young people do not need to be involved in every stage of the process, but they should be kept informed of what is happening at each stage.
POLICY DEVELOPMENT. Young people can also work on policy development. They can often generate innovative discipline and behaviour management policies, for example, and can make real contributions to school improvement plans. One of the most obvious things that children and young people can teach adults is how to write these documents in language that is accessible to the student population. School rules and staff handbooks, for example, would probably be more interesting and more often used if they were written and designed alongside children.
INVOLVEMENT IN SCHOOL GOVERNANCE. Ultimately, children and young people should be involved in the governance of schools. Governors need to understand the issues that students think are relevant, and young people's views need to be taken into account by people who control the financial resources of the school. Inviting a young person to sit on the Board of Governors can go some way towards achieving this but risks being tokenistic. Governors can also have 'surgeries' for children at the school or can make their email addresses available to students. Governing bodies are likely to require some preparation before children or young people join them at their meetings. Governors need to be prepared to change the way their meetings are structured, to explore ways of incorporating some fun, to be pulled up when they use jargon, or when they interrupt or talk over the top of students. Governors are often reluctant to accept that young people can contribute to 'high-level' discussions, such as those relating to staffing or to finance. But experience of working alongside young people on these decisions is likely to remedy their misapprehensions. With appropriate support, young people are able to make valuable and insightful contributions to decision-making at senior management level.
Will these steps lead to real school improvement? Undoubtedly! Students will feel a greater sense of ownership of what is, after all, their school. Many will feel a renewed investment in their educational futures. They will have learned a range of skills to complement those they gain in their classrooms. And they are likely to have an increased appreciation of the talents and roles of their teachers, as well as an understanding of the pressures that teaching staff face.
It is the adults in the school, however, who have the most to gain. Teachers can increase their skills in engaging with students, and individual teaching practice will become more relevant and innovative. Student participation can also remind 'burned out' staff why they wanted to work with children in the first place. An additional benefit of student participation is that it increases the respect with which teachers treat children. For example, once you start involving young people in decision-making, it becomes more difficult to speak disparagingly about students in the staff room. You start to think that maybe there's a way to involve them in the discussions that take place about them.
If you listen better to the views of children and young people at your school, then you will create lessons that children are likely to learn the most from. You will exponentially improve your chances of recruiting the best possible staff. You will necessarily create surroundings that are young-people friendly, and rules that children are more likely to sign up to and actively support.
Ultimately, amplifying the voices of students in schools can lead to a culture of genuine partnership, where children, young people and adults view themselves as equal partners in change. It fosters an environment of mutual respect and mutual learning, where the teachers see themselves also as pupils, and where students believe they have something of value to teach others. Listening better to the voices of students can create schools that everyone can be proud of.
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Franklin, Bob (ed.) (2001). The New Handbook of Children's Rights: Comparative Policyand Practice, Routledge.
Freeman, Michael (ed.) (1996). ' Children's Rights: A Comparative Perspective ' , in Issues in Law and Society, Dartmouth, 1996.
Lansdown, Gerison. Promoting Children's Participation in Democratic Decision-Making. Unicef Innocenti Insight, 2001.
McAuley, Karen and Marion Brattmore. Hearing Young Voices: Consulting Children and Young People, Including Those Experiencing Poverty or OtherForms of Social Exclusion, in Relation to Public Policy Development in Ireland. Open Your Eyes to Child Poverty Institute, 2002.
Willow, Carolyne. Participation in Practice. London: The Children's Society, 2002.
Wise, Kristyn, Kate Gledhill, Sue McKenzie, Liz Dodson and Gwen James. Up the Ladder of Young People's Participation. London: CROA, 2002.
Dr Kristyn Wise has just moved to Brazil, where she is working to develop student participation at the British School, in Rio de Janeiro. Prior to this she was working in England for many years, promoting children's rights. She is the author of numerous articles on rights and participation issues and is co-author of ' Up the Ladder of Young People's Participation ' , ' Training Young People for Active Participation ' and ' Training the Trainers for Total Respect ' .
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