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School Councils – School Improvement:
the view of the project manager

Lois Canessa's role as full-time project manager was to advise on participatory structures, train students and staff and develop various projects. She was disappointed by the lack of co-operation from some schools. She felt she was wasting her time where the school management was only interested in having the boxes ticked rather than getting genuinely involved in the whole process. She was sometimes frustrated by lack of access to heads and their unwillingness to enter into discussions with her, seeing her as someone with little status. One head teacher actually had Lois and Professor Lynn Davies escorted out of the school and forbidden to return. The initial list of ten schools was soon reduced to eight.

She wrote, “I think all staff under-estimate the contempt with which students hold tokenistic school councils that are only there to serve the purposes of the adults. They also resent the amount of time they invest in these attempts only to be disappointed time after time when they are not taken seriously, or nobody has the decency to explain to them why a particular decision has been made.”

Her interventions were less successful than she had hoped, and by the end of her three years, she came to attribute this largely to school managers who tried to introduce “a little bit of democracy.” There can be no such thing as a little bit of democracy in schools, she says, or a little bit of student voice. Small concessions are not seen by pupils as a start on the road to anything, they are perceived as what they are – tokenism. You either trust students and believe in involving them in decision-making or you don't – there can be no compromise. Lois herself does trust children, and this differentiates her from most teachers: as one student commented, “Lois acts normal, not like a teacher, just like a normal person.”

What senior managers perceive as a sensibly cautious “little bit” leads to pupils feeling frustrated and despondent at the pointlessness of it all. In spite of the lack of empathy on the part of some staff and the hostility of some unions, Lois believes that proper communication and training would make it possible to introduce student voice without the cautious limitations managers seem to think necessary. There is no need for teachers to feel threatened by a process which can lead to improvement for all parties. It is only when it is done badly, for instance in a tokenistic way, or because the management have a hidden agenda of surveillance of staff, that there is anything to fear.

In Lois's view the mark of a good Head is readiness to accept the students' right to voice an opinion about any decision that affects them - a right that is enshrined in article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Britain is a signatory. Few staff at grass roots level, Lois believes, are aware of any of the legislation.

In the traditional hierarchy, children are considered to be inferior and ignorant. Letting children have their say about decision-making challenges this hierarchy. Lois has seen that the children, far from being ignorant and inferior, are actually the people who know most about daily life in their schools and the issues and problems that arise. This was not understood in all of the eight schools where she worked. Unless pupil voice was an integral part of the school's management it was never heard, because managers saw it as a threat. They completely misjudged the pupil body. Most children understand clearly that it is in their own interest to make their schools into better places. If they are given the opportunity that is what they will do.

Some Heads, afraid of releasing unpredictable and uncontrollable demands for change, limited the frequency of council meetings and restricted the range of topics that could be discussed. In Lois's experience this kind of attempt to control the agenda led to widespread frustration and the feeling that nothing can be achieved.

Staff, especially senior managers, have to realise that student councils will never flourish unless the students' opinions are given a fair hearing. This does not mean the management simply giving way. On several occasions Lois saw Heads refusing requests, but pupils being satisfied with an up-front explanation. For the children it is the process of discussion and involvement that matters. Students are cautious. They accept that fledgling student voice will never take off if its demands are unrealistic.

Lois has observed that most staff would accept an incremental approach, allowing one small step at a time. However, this is not compatible with a genuine belief in involving students in decision-making, because if you believe in student voice then you must allow it to impact on all areas of school life. When managers settle for the odd consultation exercise with a group of unrepresentative students it does not strike a small blow for pupil voice; it actually undermines it, because children can see that it does not show any genuine trust in their good sense and responsibility.

At the end of her three years of working with schools that were inclining towards a more democratic approach, Lois declares that to be effective student voice must be an integral part of school management, and not merely added in, as it was in some of the schools in her project, where only very few of the staff were even aware of what she was doing. The more successful schools had Heads who genuinely believed in student voice as a useful way forward, and not merely as a box to be ticked. They saw that it was inconsistent to devolve responsibility for student voice to a subordinate and so they themselves took an active role in promoting it throughout the school. Without the whole-hearted support of the head teacher, says Lois, student voice can never gain its proper credibility or demonstrate its potential for school improvement.

 

 

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