Progress so far

Aims

• to develop student consultation that will inform and impact upon teaching and learning in Year 8 and across the whole school.
• to use consultation and participation as a means of improving students' attitudes to learning through developing feelings of inclusion and self worth.
• to ensure that Year 8 had a focus aimed at the whole year group - a special activity for them - as the year is often seen as a drifting year.

The intention was to run a pilot in Year 8 over the first term of 2004/5. It is then hoped to run this over the whole school from January and then as part of the Leading Edge Partnership in Carlisle from September 2005.

What has happened?

1.  Two members of staff met with the Psychology team from St. Martin's College(University of Lancashire) to agree on project details and roles.
2. Staff from a number of departments met to discuss the project and how we would select students.
3. Students volunteered for the project after talks in assembly.
4. Students were chosen on the basis of sex and ability.
5. Training sessions were led by lecturers from the college - leading discussions on the definition of a good lesson and research techniques.
6. A questionnaire was produced to use as a base line for the project.
7. Observation training was completed.
8. Two students will observe their class on 4 separate occasions over the next 4 weeks-results to be analysed by St. Martin's over Christmas.
9. Students and staff will complete an evaluation of the pilot at the end of term

 Some students comment:

"I think the student voice is a good thing as students get to tell the teachers how they like to learn.."  Natasha Kay

"As a member of the student voice project I feel that it is well worth all the effort involved. As well as helping teachers make their lessons more interesting from the students' point of view, it improves the relationship and communication between the student and the teacher. It is very exciting to be involved in a project like this....."  Alasdair Sykes

Student Voice Update

The first part of the pilot from September to Christmas proved to be a great success. A total of 35 observations took place during the second half term. Seven teachers were observed by a total of 14 students. The results were interesting and they highlighted a number of issues particularly those relating to gender. The evaluation of this process also picked up on the fact that the observation sheet that we devised did not give us all of the information that we wanted. It was clear that to move the project on we needed to revisit this area and also start to open the project up to other students.

It was decided to try and give the students more autonomy; staff had been leading the project and as such it was felt that the students were generally compliant with what we staff suggested and were maybe not challenging staff perceptions as we thought they might. The drop off rate of disaffected students was also an issue. The nine students who have continued with the project are all high ability well motivated and well behaved students. We decided to try to find out why students with a different ‘agenda’ have dropped out of the project.

The nine remaining students are now working on a weekly basis with staff. They have fed back information to form groups during tutor time, in an assembly to the whole year group and also to staff during a lunchtime meeting. From the work in the first term the group have identified two areas in need of development. There is now a group looking at the observation sheet and how it needs improving. They are aiming to use this to start some lesson observations towards the end of the summer term. Another group are looking at developing the questionnaire that we used in the first term. They are aiming to develop this so that they can canvas the opinion of all students. They will then be able to identify the issues that each year group highlight and this will enable them to run focus groups within each year group. The student voice group have also been asked to contribute to a whole school policy group that are looking at ‘Behaviour and Sanctions’. A third group are therefore looking at collecting students’ views in this area.

Each of these subgroups has three students in it with a member of staff overseeing and advising but not leading the group. It is hoped that the students will therefore take the lead. We are also looking at identifying a group of disaffected year 8 students to work together to give their perspective on each of the three above areas. The decision to broaden the group was also made and it was decided to ask for volunteers from year 7. The present year 8 groups are in the process of producing a power point presentation about the project that they will the show to year 7 during an assembly and through this start the recruitment process with year 7.

Dave McPartlan.