Replacing the Whitehall council?

Civitas, 9 March 2007

‘Every school in England should set up a council so pupils can have a voice in the appointment of teachers and running the school, a Commons committee says,’ reports the BBC News website today under the headline ‘School councils a must, say MPs.’ Based on research done by London University’s Institute of Education [where, notably, most government-used policy evidence seems to come from] the Education and Skills Select Committee are advising that the government should make school councils compulsory.

There is no doubt that the government will seize the concept excitedly. The idea of publicly implementing innovative structures to give pupils a voice, whilst continuing to skip merrily past virtually gagged teachers, would be trademark New Labour education strategy. Drowned out by Whitehall diktat, teachers – even heads and deputies, who one imagines are paid higher salaries in order to make decisions – have been virtually removed from the decision-making process. In line with this lack of school autonomy is the vision that union leaders have of how school councils would actually be realised: imposed from above structurally and thereby inflexible. Past precedent would indeed suggest that not only would schools have to establish school councils, they would also have to follow highly prescriptive central guidelines about how to go about it and what to do within them. The Committee’s report however argues that ‘well-run councils offer students opportunities to participate in democratic, representative practices, such as elections, and to effect change in their environments’. The idea of pupils effecting ‘change’, bypassing minute-by-minute central regulations and attaining a great deal more influence on school activity than their teachers, sounds like perhaps members of the Committee are a little out of touch with the effects policy has had on school life today.