In Praise of the Student Council

Timing is everything.

Take fish and chips.

Fish and chips can be the best meal in the world (and I know that Team IT agree with me because they practically live on the stuff) but the timing has got to be right.

First of all you have to be really hungry and secondly you should have just done something which justifies feasting on something so calorific. My preference would be after a long, cold and wet walk on a Northumberland beach in thick mist, ideally involving some serious sand dune jumping justified by the presence of small children. So you take your self to the brink of exhaustion and hypothermia and then head for a hot ,steamy cafe in Seahouses for haddock, chips and luminous green mushy peas with a jug of tea and thinly sliced white bread and butter served up a by a grumpy woman in a nylon tabard.

Nothing could be finer.

Anyway, just in case you've forgotten, I'm talking about timing and I must say that my timing was impeccable of Friday afternoon.

I'd realised that it had been a while since I'd had some quality time with our student council. Because of the opening of the academy in September, we have two momentous terms ahead of us so I need to be closely in touch with how the students feel. It's also vital that they feel part of the process and that they have a say in the inevitable changes. They’re the reasons why I decided to have an all afternoon meeting with them in The Phoenix Centre.

By the way, you might be surprised to learn that the student council is sometimes on the receiving end of adult criticism. The main complaint is that the group is unrepresentative of the full range of ages and abilities at Moorside. Well, there 's truth in this but it's not the fault of the student councillors. We should thank them for giving up their time every week for meetings and for the contributions they make to self evaluation, recruiting staff and fund raising. If there are any shortcomings, I suppose that they might lie with how we organise the student council. I guess that we could do more to ensure that more students put themselves forward, but for the time being we have to work with those who do volunteer, even though they tend to be female and in the top sets.

And if you'd been with me on Friday afternoon, I guarantee that you would have been impressed by them. Here was a group of young people passionately devoted to their school, united by a desire to improve it, especially it's climate for learning. In fact they were so passionate that Lindsey Bell and I couldn’t shut them up! We only covered half of the agenda, but still made great progress.

I particularly wanted their views on why girls tend to do better in exams. Thanks to them, by the end of the afternoon, I understood much more about what needs to happen in lessons to even up the gender gap. The main outcome was that the student council has agreed to run a workshop on this issue at our next staff training day on February 28. So the students will be teaching the staff which sounds good to me.

So, from my point of view, the timing oft this meeting was perfect because it re-focused me on the core business putting teaching and learning first. And I left work for the weekend reminded of what magnificent students we have at Moorside.


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