Student Council

  Welcome to this information page about our student council. My name is Kristy Lidgard and I am the co-coordinator for the student voice.

After a successful launch in the autumn term, with a real life election and balloting process the student council has been up and running for five months now and is working incredibly well.    Student Council Model.pdf

The structure model of the Carter Community School council. If we start at the bottom of the model, we have our whole school, we then have the four separate year groups and within the year groups we have tutor groups. There are two student council representatives from each tutor group. I meet with each year council separately every four to five weeks. After the year council meetings I put together an agenda of the issues highlighted at the year meetings, ready to put forward at the next stage of our council model which is the School Improvement Team Meeting (SIT).

At the School Improvement Team meeting there are three members from each year council. Depending on the agenda set, the student's will decide who is best to represent their year at this meeting. This meeting is where decisions are made, we always have a member of the senior management team present who has had the agenda in advance so is able to deliver answers and plans to enable a proactive meeting. As you can see from the structure other members of the community attend the meeting, depending on the issues and if it may affect them. We often have our chair of governors Margaret Westlake attending, which keeps the student voice in constant communication with the leaders and decision makers in our school.

Each of our student representatives holds a portfolio of interest. This allows the students to keep a record of all meetings, including offsite visits to other school council forum meetings and areas they have represented. We have found this to be effective when the year councils are deciding who is best to represent at the SIT meetings, as they can consult their portfolios to show who has experience on the particular items on the agenda set.

After the SIT meeting the minutes are discussed and information fed back to the separate year council meetings who in turn inform their tutor groups so we have a constant flow of communication throughout the whole school. And then the process is repeated with a new set of issues which have arisen in the meantime.

 If you have any suggestions, concerns or ideas to help improve our school please ensure you talk to these members