Student voice has always been one of my passions. I started my first student council as a head of year over twenty years ago, after reading books like Donna Brandes and Paul Ginnis “The Student Centred School” . The year council, as it was then, was a great success with my year group, if not with year head colleagues who thought I had joined the “loony left “by instigating such activity. Other students were curious about it and were often found peering in through the window of our room. It was well attended and the students organised lots of activities including in Year 11 (or fifth year as it was then) weekend in London, which my husband and I accompanied them on, but which they had organised themselves. They were a very capable group of confident pupils who, thanks to modern networks like friends reunited and facebook, I know went on to lead very successful and fulfilling lives.

In all my schools, since then, I have been actively involved in initiating or supporting student councils and have sat through endless hours of discussion on toilets, school dinners and uniform. In my present school we run a student voice day each year. The timetable is suspended for the day and we have students in cross year groups, involved in workshops, often lead by visitors, on a variety of topics selected by the organising committee. The organising committee includes both staff and students but the students are the ones who have the final say in how the day is run. Feedback from the entire student body is always positive and has informed the organisation for the following year.

Our student council is run on a fortnightly meeting schedule, with the year council on the intervening weeks and we have a member of staff allocated to each year group to support. Each tutor group elects two reps for the year council and each year group four reps for the school council. We have to have student council meetings after school on Fridays, as this is the only available time but we do provide transport home in the school minibus for students who require it.

We often have visitors at our student council meetings, the school cook, the local police officer and other members of the community. Many of our students have progressed well through their involvement with the council. One recent ex- student now delivers training on student voice for the local authority. The students have initiated changes within school such as the introduction of a break time fruit bar and the fundraising and purchase of student lockers. The student council are involved in interviewing new staff and their views are seriously considered when appointments are made, in fact they selected our present head teacher after a 30 minute interview, whilst the governors took another day and a half to agree with them.

Despite the seeming success of student voice at my school, I still feel that it has a long way to go. It is run in the main by a group of our more capable students who are usually involved in all the other activities on offer in school. Student from less supportive homes do not tend to be as involved or if they are, keeping them attending is more difficult. The council often have to be prompted to initiate activities themselves instead of bringing a wish list to staff and we still have to talk about toilets at every other meeting. However, despite this, after a long hard week and all the stresses of the job, attending the student council meeting still has the effect of sending me home on a Friday night with a smile on my face and a belief that I am definitely in the right job.

Jill Robson

Recent OFSTED guidance from January 2010 notes that, “the needs of learners with chronic or long term medical conditions must be considered alongside other vulnerable groups.” It states that inspectors should “ask questions of staff and pupils to prompt schools to ensure they are doing all they can to safeguard and support this potentially vulnerable group of learners.” It also states that “Inspectors should note that in mainstream schools medical needs do not automatically equate to special educational needs.”

I applaud this document as I hope, by raising their profile, it will help those of us who are struggling to maintain continuity and quality of educational provision for this cohort of young people, We should no longer have to rely on the goodwill of individual teachers. Despite schools being required to have a policy for pupils with medical conditions and a named person since the publication of the Access to Education Document DEFS 2001, this has not always happened.

I have worked with pupils with medical needs for over 20 years, striving to help them maintain a ‘normal’ existence in schools. This has often been challenging. For a busy teacher, remembering the absent pupil who yet again has missed a lesson, is hard when trying to deal with the many differing needs of those who are present. However, for that pupil it can make a massive difference to know that he has been remembered and he has completed the same work as his class mates whilst, for example, being absent during chemotherapy sessions.

Where we have been successful, the key elements to achieving that success have been:

• Having regular multi-agency meetings
• Involving the pupil voice
• Working closely with parents/carers and medical practitioners
• Working closely with school staff and having immediate and easy access to curriculum information
• Working closely with other professionals involved with the pupil and his family.

As with most other vulnerable pupils, children and young people with medical conditions want to fit in with their peers. Schools can help them to achieve this by developing systems which will minimise the disruption to the learners’ education and promote their health and wellbeing within the school environment.

The questions raised in the OFSTED document ‘Learners with medical needs,’ will help schools to think about what they need to do for these pupils.

Alison Boyd
Head of The Education Support Team for Medical Absence (ESTMA) Hertfordshire.
alison.boyd@hertscc.gov.uk

Pastoral care has evolved so much over the last 50 years and, when writing a recent article charting the changing discourses and priorities over that time, I was struck by how difficult it is to write about pastoral care in schools with such a divergence and multiplicity of structures, practice and understandings. I come from, and my research has been predominantly in, the secondary sector so please accept that my examples will be drawn from that area. Those in primary and tertiary might reflect differently on the changes to their respective areas.

There was a time when large-scale initiatives such as Active Tutorial Work were common, when mention of Heads of House/Year, pastoral deputies and form tutors were the norm and where, broadly speaking, linkages between pastoral care and PSE (personal and social education) were at least predictable if only predictable in their unevenness of quality and provision.

Nowadays, school structures have changed so much, the pastoral/academic hierarchical structure of pastoral deputy, Head of House/Year, form tutor have been replaced by a range of staff with new titles and new responsibilities.

I recently visited an Academy which employed a Counsellor with higher degree qualifications in psychology and counselling. She was clearly a key member of the senior management and had a respected role in working with students with challenging social and personal circumstances. She was supported in her role by the Head who recognised her importance. Another school I visited had devolved most of the disciplinary and ’emotional first aid’ functions to Assistant Learning Co-ordinators (ALCs) with predictably variable results. Students were referred via notes in pigeon holes or ALCs engaged in elements of ‘fire fighting’ in the event of a student who was to be ejected. A third school had moved to vertical tutoring (Yr 7-11 (age 11-16)) and had smaller tutor groups of 15 which were looked after by teachers and teaching assistants. A final school had 2 Senior Management Teams – you guessed it – one for academic and one for pastoral. This throwback to previous times reminds us that not all schools have changed in some respects. It would be interesting to know how many secondary schools still have an academic and a pastoral deputy and, surely not, the equivalent of a Senior Mistress.

There are huge implications to this kaleidoscopic pattern of provision as schools cope with the huge demands that are made of them by government, society and market forces. The first of these is that it is much harder to understand what is happening in general terms. My research on citizenship brought this into stark relief. Schools’ practices in terms of marrying citizenship with pastoral care and the curriculum in a wide sense were so vastly different and revealed very different levels of conceptual understanding and sophistication.

Secondly, it presents difficulties for teacher educators. Pastoral care has always had less pre- and in-service coverage than ‘important’ subjects and arguably with the ‘Strategies’ have seen provision squeezed still further. How on earth does a teacher educator encapsulate such a multiplicity of practice during a 36-week course?

Finally, as meanings of pastoral care become more diffuse, as the Wider Children’s Workforce extends what we mean by ‘care’ and practices and structures become more complex, how are we to map this provision in such a way that pastoral care is not either high jacked to ratchet up performance, overshadowed by the apparent dominance of safeguarding as the key element of ECM (Every Child Matters) agenda or neglected by those for whom performance is the overriding concern?

There are some outstanding innovations in pastoral care provision and the above is not a call to return to the ‘cosy’ predictability of the past. There were poor practices then as now. It is simply a call to stop and think about the pattern of pastoral care provision (of staff and students), what it means in the institutions that we work in and where it is going.

Dr Mike Calvert
York St John University

Education will have to face up to the financial cuts that will come as a result of the financial crisis that has hit all sectors. Given the announcement by one political party that it will be ‘support staff’ who will need to be cut back, it is not surprising that we in pastoral teams believe it will be us who, yet again, will bear the burden of the changes ahead.

It is not so long ago that we were told that teachers must focus on the teaching and learning aspects and other staff were to take on the other roles needed to support our students. So we have set about building a team of staff and trained them to be effective in supporting young people through a whole range of needs. Gradually these staff have gained the respect and confidence of teaching colleagues as the effect of the work they do has made a positive impact on the behaviour and attitude of some students to their learning and more importantly the students and their parent/carers have become confident in the liaison and support available. Add to this the tremendous work that is now carried out by many support staff in association with other professionals; health, social care, police, mental health, Connexions, counselling to name but a few.

It has been a rocky road but at the point where I now believe things are working well and there is good teamwork between teachers and support staff, the structures are in jeopardy. It will be our students who will be hit hardest if these new pastoral teams are dismantled. All the positive work on behaviour and emotional wellbeing in particular will be affected and I cannot see who will be able to pick up the pieces this time.

How can we stave off the cuts?

How can we ensure the axe does not do irreparable damage to the fine balance that now exists?

Where shall we draw the line?…….

What are you planning. Perhaps you could share your thoughts with concerned colleagues.

Jae Bray
Deputy Headteacher