Honesty’s the best policy
When I joined Walker Primary School last year, it was obvious that the school website did not reflect the school’s warm and child-centred culture. When we asked four of our year 6 pupils to support me with my weekly blog on the website, they gave us some honest feedback – they weren’t keen on the website because they couldn’t use it! It was wonderful to see pupils sharing their views in an open and honest way, for the good of the entire community.
Introducing ‘Learning to Lead’
I had used the outcomes of the Learning to Lead research project (Faculty of Education, Cambridge University) at my previous school so it seemed like an ideal time to introduce this at Walker. The children were extremely excited to be involved and really enthusiastic about the idea.
We set up a series of weekly meetings involving the pupils and three staff sponsors. Together, the team developed a project plan and set targets so they had something to aim for. The main aim was to develop something user-friendly that would attract pupils and parents; we also wanted the website to be a more accurate window to the world.
We asked the pupils to research other school websites and look at what they did and didn’t like. They presented the results to us and we could see very quickly that they wanted a more animated, colourful and bright website that was easier to use.
Peer-to-peer research
Having established how they wanted the website to look, the next stage was to find out what others wanted from it. The Learning to Lead team carried out surveys with other pupils and teachers in the school.
The children gathered and analysed internal feedback and then delivered a presentation to parent governors (as a way of involving parents) and a few members of staff. They had prepared pie charts of their analysis and video clips of the staff who were interviewed. It was fantastic.
Bringing the idea to life
At that point, we got the go-ahead to redesign the website. We held a conference call with our chosen designers, the four pupils and three members of staff in order to discuss our requirements.
Again, it was great for the children to be involved in this exercise – it helped them to develop skills that they are inevitably going to need and use in later life. Although we were facilitating the call, the children were equal partners – they had as much input as every adult did during that call.
Promoting the launch
When the design came through, we reviewed it with the children, who were able to advise on any design changes. As soon as the final layout had been agreed, the team set a launch date and started to consider how best we could advertise our beautiful, new website.
The year 6 pupils involved were asked to “employ” other pupils in their year to design posters inviting parents to join us at two special launch assemblies. The week before the launch, pupils stood outside the school at the beginning and end of the day holding posters to advertise it. The advertising worked – our assemblies saw an amazing turn-out by parents, and we reached our first 1,000 hits after just 4.5 days of the site going live.
The feedback has been incredible – parents and pupils are engaged and have completely bought into it. That is all down to our Learning to Lead team and their efforts. Furthermore, a candidate who came for an interview at the school shortly afterwards said that she had looked at our website before visiting and, unprompted, told me how well the website reflected the feel of the school.
Real-life skills
Some of the things that adults in schools spend valuable time “sorting out” can very easily be led by pupils, so why not involve them? My aim for this and all our Learning to Lead projects is for our pupils to be as involved as much as possible, and it is working really well.
Our website team was able to see the project through from start to finish and build on those all-important real-life skills. The whole project was a learning curve for the pupils involved, even down to the fact that they had initially imagined that the whole thing would be done and dusted in a couple of weeks – they soon realised that all of the different elements would take time and far longer than they anticipated. This gave them a genuine flavour of the world of work as they learnt how to manage the various stages of the project accordingly.
Our first website Learning to Lead pupils left us in July 2015, but before they went onto pastures new, they trained up a group of existing year 5 pupils (now in year 6) to pick up the website Learning to Lead baton.
Conclusion
One year on at Walker, I am able to reflect on the importance of providing our pupils with opportunities to lead on projects like this. While some of the real-life skills they developed were very obvious – project-planning, being part of a conference call and presenting to governors, for example – other skills gained along the way were far more subtle.
Commitment to the project, time-management and being able to negotiate with the adult sponsors (and each other) were three important skills that increased in importance as the project gained momentum and other pressures associated with being pupils in year 6 took hold.
As equal partners in the project, the pupils owned it fully and, as a result, took complete responsibility for it. It was a very proud moment for them when the website was launched and they delivered the assemblies to the school community.
The wonderful thing is that our second Learning to Lead website team has taken on a completely different role based on the needs identified by the school. During the first week of the new term, the pupils were linked with class teachers across the school to support them in using their class pages on the website. Three weeks in, the pupils were so impressed with the teachers’ efforts that they emailed their link teachers to say “well done”! Learning is a two-way street at Walker.
- Jennifer Malone is headteacher at Walker Primary School in Enfield, which worked with PrimarySite on its new website.