Student Voice

Categories: Principal's Blog

It's been a busy few weeks for our student councillors, visiting classes to get ideas and opinions from tutor groups.  The posters around college showing the number to text with ideas, concerns and suggestions and the email address have started to get used.  This week at student council we had three messages in particular that we discussed - and the minutes of those meetings are going to be put on Moodle.  

One message was to do with a complaint that the council can't deal with but were able to pass to me to deal with, the other two came from the assemblies Mr Steed gave about the possibility of starting to have mixed-age tutor groups.  I know that Mr Steed is hoping to speak to the council again in the next week about an idea to try out a mixed age tutor group for a few weeks (with volunteers of course) to work out some of the details and see how people feel about it.

Voting is now just about up for the uniform poll. About a quarter of the (hundreds of) people who responded were parents or staff, the rest students from all year groups.  By and large all three groups of people voted the same way with a very strong majority for one particular set of choices.  I am going to present those choices to governors unchanged (except for a couple of people who sadly couldn't give their opinion without using some pretty bad language!) with my proposal.  The decision, as well as all the results of the poll will be published on the website as soon after the meeting (on the 8th February) as I can manage.

Finally, I can't finish without mentioning something that has really impressed me this week.  I've said before how welcoming and positive I've found our students, but this week I made two visits to the Design & Technology team with two of our governors, Mr Wiseman and Mr Delbridge.  We went into a total of 10 classes over a four hour period and spoke to students from different years about their work and how they felt about it.  I wasn't just pleased with the great way our students talked to the governors and the quality of their work - I would expect that anyway - but I was really encouraged by the way that the older students, especially Year 11, were able to talk intelligently about how they were progressing and what they need to do to improve.  One thing is to wait for your teachers to tell you what you need to do, but to me what counts is thinking for yourself and taking full responsibility for your own project.