Evaluation reports of Student Voice, Agency and Participation initiatives within schools frequently point to the sustainability of such approaches. “If we came back in five years,” they say, “would this still be happening?” They point to a concern that initiatives are often driven by individual enthusiasms, and vanish when the initiator moves on.
At the same time, where schools are being asked by their systems to include student voice, agency and partnerships/participation in their school plans, there is little guidance as to what this might look like. Schools report that they struggle to know what is required and to define such on-going policy and practice commitments.
This workshop is intended to start a conversation about the need for embedding student voice, agency and partnerships/participation within school plans and planning processes. How do we make such lasting commitments, in ways that ensure that we go beyond individual enthusiasms or sometimes tokenistic responses to central policy directives?
The language and terminology, as well as system requirements, differ between jurisdictions eg in Victoria, government schools are required to:
• develop 4 year School Strategic Plans with long term improvement goals;
• each year, develop Annual implementation plans, with strategies and actions to meet those goals;
• establish school improvement teams, who are in charge of driving and monitoring implementation;
• publish Annual Report to the School Community; and
• go through a 4 yearly school review.
What does this look like for Student Voice, Agency and Participation? How does or might this planning happen, in ways that reflect the principles of student voice, agency and partnerships?
This workshop will explore these ideas, with a view to generating some practical examples of appropriate school planning. These examples could be collected in a future issue of ReConnectEd, as a way of providing some ideas and guidance for schools around policy and practices.
It is envisaged that the workshop will start with a short re-iteration of the need, then invite participants to contribute their own stories and examples of school plans and policy – including the process of developing these. Hopefully, these will draw on the situation in different jurisdictions across Australia. We’ll test out whether (and how) we might collect these examples for publication.
Roger Holdsworth
Roger is a semi-failed retiree; ex-secondary teacher; ex-youth sector policy worker; ex-University researcher; ex-consultant; ex-editor, Connect. Currently: presenter of the Global Village on PBS 106.7 FM