Centre stage papers – Days 3, 4 & 5: Extending the vision

Deep learning through student voice at Greenford High School

 

In 2004 we had a student council, supported by the usual framework of year councils. The student council discussed food, lockers, litter bins and occasionally spent a little money on the environment. They also took part in interviewing new staff and had done so for nearly a decade, although this was always in the form of a separate panel that reported its views to the Head. Then we took away salt, banned cans, and told the students about the new school buildings. The discussions intensified, but nothing changed: we didn’t have a structure that embedded students’ voices in school developments. We’d never treated them seriously enough to let them loose on by far the most important aspect of school: their own learning.

Greenford is a large, multicultural comprehensive languages college in West London, bordering on Southall, and with an ethnic mix that defies easy explanation. From being perceived a failing school 15 years ago, it has improved dramatically: over two-thirds of our students achieve five ‘good’ grades at 16, nearly 60% of them with English and Maths General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). We have 500 post-16 students, following courses at all levels, but with a strong bias towards level 3. Our value-added scores have always been outstanding, and we’ve encouraged a rigorously inclusive view of education that extends far beyond the school. At the same time, paradoxically, we’re quite a traditional, hierarchical school. We might have a Leading Edge partnership with another school to develop a ground-breaking literacy intervention programme with Lindamood-Bell; we might be an ambassador for Social Inclusion for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT); but we had a compliant, passive student body following a qualification-heavy curriculum. Students got good results and the school had improved. However, we needed to do something extra to prepare them for a very different world.

In January 2005 I attended a David Hargreaves/SSAT conference on ‘Assessment for Learning’, and decided that we would bid to become a regional ‘hub’ when these were advertised. I then proposed a strategy, built around personalising learning and Hargreaves’ nine gateways, to the senior leadership team This strategy paper, redrafted many times in the following months, outlined our current position and suggested how we could take the school forward in a very different way, putting student voice at the heart of all our work. I felt this could create the right conditions for ‘deep learning’ (although the phrase wasn’t yet current) and that we had the right starting points: an increasingly engaged, frustrated student body; an enthusiastic, committed staff with a relatively inexperienced profile; excellent support networks in school; a leadership team about to change and broaden; and a headteacher who wanted to try something different because she perceived that the school had reached a key point on the sigmoid curve.

The strategy took Hargreaves’ gateways as starting points and sought to create a coherent whole from them. We discussed the details and developed more strands over a number of months, but the core remained unchanged.

1. Student voice. This was the key, and we couldn’t do anything without it. We accepted that we would need to embed it over a couple of years and we took the essential decision that it would be centred unambiguously on teaching and learning: the peripheral stuff would be sidelined and we didn’t want headline-catching gimmicks to get in the way of our much ‘deeper’ strategy. We would begin with student observers, who would be trained to visit teachers’ lessons and deliver professional feedback; we would also use students to provide the initial push towards a radical new curriculum, as well as ensuring that they retained a strong voice as it was developed; and we would move towards a ‘junior leadership team’, shadowing our senior leadership team, who would run all aspects of student work in the school. This would include the observations and the consultations, but would also embrace close working with the senior leadership team and attendance at strategy meetings, as well as managing our system of ‘student faculty boards’ (students charged to work closely with faculty areas, specifically on the development of learning and teaching strategies). We also decided to appoint a ‘student voice coordinator’, a full-time post to be filled by a recent graduate.

2. Curriculum. With students as our driver and our guides, we needed to personalise the curriculum. We began a consultation process that is about to end, with accelerated learning, flexible key stages, an open choice of a wider range of courses, 14-19 packages, qualifications when ready, a reconstructed core and a new school day.

3. Assessment for learning. A perennial development target for the school, we recognised that this would have to use students’ voices to make any real progress, and to be directly linked to the new curriculum. The student faculty boards would need to have specific responsibility to work on the learning implications of this, and we would have to sharpen up our use of data to ensure that staff, students and parents had access to it.

All quite ambitious, and we soon realised that these three areas were impossible to separate. At the same time, though, we saw that they wouldn’t be successful unless we created the right conditions for them, so we looked at some of the other gateways.

4. New technologies. We immediately began investigating learning platforms, and have just chosen and bought the product that will work best for us, ignoring some advice that urged us to wait for a broader base (incidentally, remaining true to our belief that local solutions work best, and that networks should be built between independent institutions, each developing their own innovative approaches). Our learning platform will develop students’ independent learning, and allow them to pursue paths that make sense to them, as well as enabling meaningful Assessment for Learning to take place, with student, parents, teachers and mentors all involved.

5. Guidance, advice and mentoring. We also realised that we had to have a new model for supporting students, and that this area would draw on our strengths. We already had a pastoral system that had employed professionals from a wide range of backgrounds in positions previously filled by teachers. We now had to find a way of supporting learning that used their expertise, as well as the experience and know-how possessed by our teachers. Our first move was to increase the number of pastoral workers, remove teachers from all work on behaviour, and appoint five ‘learning coordinators’ (teachers with responsibility for monitoring the progress of students and developing our use of data in the school). The long-term aim is to move towards a system of ‘key workers’, with a central mentor able to coordinate the learning and support for each individual student.

We hadn’t focused on all of Hargreaves’ gateways in this strategy and, even though we started work on ‘Learning to Learn’ immediately, we saw this as a bit vague, preferring to view it more generally under ‘teaching and learning’. The leadership aspect was implicit in the first instance, then tackled under our new structure, which created a new senior team, with posts now specifically focused on teaching, learning and attainment in different areas of the school. A growing team of advanced skills teachers also took on new whole-school responsibilities.

This, then, was our strategy for creating the conditions for deep learning, and we’ve come quite a long way. We’ve appointed most of our junior leadership team. Our student observers were a great success and are about to begin training the second cohort. Our new curriculum is close to taking a coherent shape. We have a learning platform – again, the students took on a significant role in the initial stages – and we’re about to propose another shift in our support structure that will take us towards a mentoring model, with a personalised curriculum supported by ‘key workers’. The student faculty boards will be established soon after Christmas, and our role as a hub school, firstly for student voice and now, in collaboration with four other schools, for deep learning, has had a galvanising effect. We have built links with other schools; our students have offered their accounts of what has been happening, and we now have a leadership cohort of well-informed, committed young people who really want to change things. Perhaps not unusual, but we believe that we’re now very close to an embedded structure that will allow them to do this.

But what of the teachers? If students act as the drivers, where does that leave the teachers, not to mention the wide range of other staff in a school? When we introduced student observers, we had to overcome opposition from senior teachers, then persuade other teachers to take part. We didn’t find this difficult, choosing our teachers carefully, and then allowing them to take back the overwhelmingly positive feedback to the staff room. When we asked students to work on the curriculum, we involved younger staff initially, then engaged the whole staff body in developing our ideas. We’ve tried a number of different models but the message has been consistent: bottom-up development applies to both the students and to the staff.

We move into new school buildings in July 2007. By then, we’re confident that we’ll have a fully embedded system of student voice in our school, and that the voice will be taking us further and further down the road to personalising the students’ learning experiences. The choice and flexibility they have demanded will be in place in the curriculum, and learning will be increasingly active, with an ever-greater emphasis placed on learning beyond the classroom. The model will be one of co-construction and we’ll be the richer for it.

A final word: there’s a danger that the individualised learning experience will lead to dislocation, fragmentation and a loss of the social and pastoral aspects of the UK education system. I’ve also been concerned by the eagerness with which business and enterprise has taken up ‘personalising learning’. If it can be done better by a company, we’re told, why not outsource? The ethical dimension is an interesting one, and we have to explore it further with our students. However, our conversations with them so far suggest that their concerns more than match ours. If we are really to listen to our students, we should hear very clearly their reluctance to become an adjunct of the corporate world. Our new curriculum will include an increased space for ‘life skills’, the most prominent of all the demands from students, who wanted to explore what it means to be a citizen well away from the restrictions set by the commercialised world outside.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Alex Reed is Deputy Headteacher at Greenford High School, in London, UK.

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