A festive update on the SSCC!
As we get nearer to Christmas and New Year, I thought I’d write a little blog about what’s been happening here at the Smart School Councils Community (SSCC).
It’s the first few months that we’ve been able to dedicate more time to the growth of the organisation, and it’s been quite an exciting time.
Training:
We’ve been super-busy with training school councillors across the country, as well as a trip to Warsaw and the Czech Republic. We haven’t really stopped!
Since the start of term in September, we’ve worked directly with 778 young people and 98% of them say they’ll get more involved with school life as a result.
We’ve also trained directly 117 school council coordinators to better support their school councils. Part of this has been two very successful Smart School Council Masterclass courses – 100% of them said they would recommend the course to a colleague which is in line with previous evaluation. There’s more courses next year if you’d like to come.
Funding:
Excitingly, we’ve secured our first two funding successes!
One from the School for Social Entrepreneurs Scale Up programme, and and another from the Big Lottery. The former is an incredible year-long programme we’re I get to meet lots of other people who are trying to grow their organisation, and listen to people like Georgie Fienberg from Afrikids, Vaughn Lindsay from Dartington Hall and Terri Johnson from Fruit to Suit discuss how they’ve done it. Really inspiring.
With the Big Lottery funding, we are working with an amazing leadership team of young people from Haringey and North London to run the Young Haringey Event. This team have come up with a pirate theme for the day, which will be attended by 100 primary school councillors.Here’s some information, and get in touch if you’re local and would like to volunteer.
Perhaps most excitingly, we’re now recruiting the SSCC’s first member of staff – a Community Apprentice. This will put a young person at the heart of our organisation, who will help to improve the service we offer and help more schools. We’ll make sure to introduce you all to the new member of staff when they arrive!
Resources and the website:
We hope all of the school council resources that we’ve been putting up are useful to you. We’ve still got a lot to do in terms of how the interface for finding resources works, but we’ll be doing that next year.
We now have over 720 members of the SSCC – that’s around 600 teachers, around 100 students and a few parents too. Next year, we’ll be looking to make the site more attractive to young people next year so that the site can have more of an impact with students.
What’s next?
Next year, we’ll keep on uploading great resources for schools, and continue to work with more schools.
We’ll also be looking for funding for a few very exciting projects that we’re working on.
Thank you for reading, and have a lovely festive period!
Greg
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