Tuesday 16 June 2015

School Council Fails Again

The first article from a new member of the Trash writing team, P. I. Staker:

The fortnightly convening of the rag-tag bunch of lost Year 7's and the odd not-at-all-in-any-way-high Year 11 has begun. Yes, that's right, in an effort to make School Council more effective, the school have decided everyone who has any connection with it must be drawn together in a secret, after-school meeting, wherein the viability of "more bins" and "Fanta fountains" are decided on, predictably judged to be unfeasible.

This is an apparent well-meaning attempt by the SLT to make "the student voice heard more clearly," but what they seem to have forgotten is the principle that 0 x 0 = 0. The School Council is about as useful as an RE GCSE (or BTEC equivalent) on a job application; a pathetic attempt at fulfilling that specific section of the Rights Respecting School Award. In a system governed by a group of executives, the voice of the majority is rendered insignificant. It may well be that a majority of the school is Muslim, but Caterlink, the external food contractor provided by Camden still refuse to provide Halal meat. Why? Because the clear wishes of a majority of the pupils are insignificant in the face of profit margins.

The idea behind the School Council is that pupils feedback to a Class Representative of which there are two per class. They then feedback to the two year reps who gather and make decisions as one committee. An easy enough system it seems (apart from the one in which the feedback from School Council is written down and given to all students, rather than the four-tier Chinese whispers). The issue is the School Council has no scope for actual enactment of change; they decide on something which, as this publication has said many a time before, is then ignored or denied by the Head, and therein lies the issue.

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