Curriculum leadership training from year 3

‘The laptop trainers’ are a remarkable bunch of students who started their leadership training when in year three. Ryan tells me that ‘I always wanted to be a trainer so when the year six came and someone asked our class who would be interested, I was at the front of the queue’. After two years of training by her peers, Zoe can reflect on the experience and confidently tells me that ‘our training is much better now, we have made it fairer and we give the younger ones real jobs to do’.

Last week, when I visited this one form entry primary school, I went to the year six class and asked the teacher if I could borrow the ‘year six laptop trainers’ for a moment. The look of panic in the teacher’s eye was testament to the incredible trust this group has achieved through years of structured peer training and the way in which the school employs them as genuine partners in the learning process. They were, it turns out, running a whole-class training session in how to manage personalised e-portfolios. I sat in on the lesson and watched as one of the team quietly walked over to a table where her classmate was making a slight noise with a pencil case and, with the skill of an experienced teacher, removed it without even taking her gaze off the class or breaking her flow.

Connie is now in year 8 in the secondary school but started her leadership training in year 4. She was the first child in her primary school to pass her ‘grade 1 leadership qualification’ when in year 6 and is now working on projects involving student-led services and producing promotional materials for local companies. When I visited her in year 5, she apologised that I would need to wait as she was training a group of year 3s in their lunchtime because demand for her team’s services were so high that it was the only time she could ‘fit them in’. The headteacher at her secondary school admits that they were just not ready for the level of leadership skills that this first generation ‘grade 1 leaders’ brought with them and it has taken two years to begin providing opportunities that can genuinely begin to build upon these skills and allow the children to maintain their progression.

To the staff and students at these schools, it makes perfect sense that student voice is not a privilege bestowed on those who have the highest profile or already hold the confidence of the school - it is a curriculum progression just like literacy or numeracy. Continued, structured and progressive training with reliable assessment at each stepping stone and increasingly challenging opportunities is essential.

When I devised the student leadership programme back in 1998, I made the mistake of selecting students for high status roles and training them myself. This is a mistake that I now see repeated in most of the schools I visit that are reporting successful student leadership schemes. The key discovery for me was the realisation that it is the training of the students which provides some of the best opportunities and there needs to be a system which is self-sustaining through the use of more experienced students inspiring younger ones by independently devising and managing their training within an agreed framework of skills. Possibly the most impressive demonstration of this I have seen was when I was giving a keynote conference in Hounslow and one of the exhibiters was a local infant school. As I approached the stand, I was greeted by the youngest chair of governors I had ever met and although the height difference didn’t seem to knock his confidence at all it certainly knocked mine! I crouched down to talk to him because looking down on such a leader just didn’t feel right. He told me he had wanted to be the chair of governors ‘for years’! He was inspired by meeting the chair from year two when he was in reception and he remembered the experience well. Having run committees, think tanks, seminars and trained ‘younger children’, he was now representing the school at a conference. Future schools would be indeed foolish not to make use of this talent but even more in error if they didn’t help to nurture it in a structured way.

In 2000, when I produced the first (?) truly student-led and student assessed qualification system in Eggbuckland Community College, it began to grow from an initial group of four students to 180 students four years later. All of this took place in what was effectively the students’ own time at break, lunch and after school. The biggest barrier to really embedding the practice was not being able to gain access to curriculum time.

This September the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) launched the PLTS (Personal Learning and Thinking Skills), which are part of the core of the new national curriculum in England. For the first time, we have the word ‘leadership’ applied as a desired outcome for year 7s in curriculum time. While the subject boards desperately try to marginalise the PLTS in favour of their beloved content, this is a key moment to seize to take us forward. In May, I produced a free poster which was sent to every secondary school in England, showing ladders of progression for the PLTS and launched an online tool to allow children to independently manage progression in their PLTS through the use of anonymous but ‘expert’ online peer assessment. ‘Personalisation by Pieces’ or PbyP for short, has, since May, been adopted by a further 50 secondary schools and incorporates the structured leadership scheme in its latest form.

There is no doubt that student leadership and co-development has a considerable positive impact on achievement by any measure you care to use, as I, and many others, have demonstrated. There is also no doubt that schools have got behind the concept of student voice as never before and are promoting its virtues in every phase of learning. The key questions for me are: can it break into curriculum time; can it cement the role of PLTS in schools; and can children expect to experience structured leadership training that builds their expertise over many years and challenges the mistaken but convenient view that some children are cut out for it and others are not.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Dan Buckley is Principal Consultant at Cambridge Education, in Plymouth, England, United Kingdom.

 

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