However, for those of you who are working through the summer, comfort yourselves with the thought that we are all here working too.  Our phone lines are open if you have any questions to ask, or want to talk through any on-going difficulties you may be encountering with the running of your School Council. 

Our on-line shop is open 24/7 and any orders placed over the summer will be despatched to you during the first few days of September.

Training enquiries and bookings will continue to be dealt with, so if you have a bit more time to think about where you want your School Council to be heading next year, why not have a chat with us about how our training can help you move forward.

The autumn term will also see the launch of our updated Primary School Council Handbooks, the 2010/11 Year Planners and both Secondary and Primary versions of Voicebox.

Meantime – have a great summer.

What did you think>

The report looked into how Stantonbury Campus, a school with 2,600 pupils, and how it manages to achieve human scale thinking in such a large school. Stantonbury Campus has divided their school into five ‘halls’ each containing around 500 pupils. The purpose of these halls is to act as mini-schools with their own individual head teacher and teaching staff.

The report is interesting in that one of the final recommendations for good practice is “Student voice involving students in the learning arrangements and organization of the school.” The way in which Stantonbury achieves this is for each hall to have their own elected school council who have control of a budget and are involved in all aspects of their hall.

We recognize that sometimes in a large school the school council does not represent all pupils, do you think by having separate school councils for different pupils will mean that the whole school is represented? Or do you think that this will mean the school will become segregated? Is there a better way of involving the whole school community in the decisions made by the school council?

Daisy