Does your Smart School Council noticeboard actually help drive change? Setting up a Smart School Council Progress board will help your Communication team to keep track of what's happening with the Action Teams and help the whole school to understand the different activities that are going on.
Pretty much every school has a school council noticeboard, and they almost all consist of the same things:
- Photos of the school council (often last year’s)
- Minutes of the the last meeting (who stops at a noticeboard to read closely-typed minutes?)
- A poster saying ‘have your say/make a difference/we’re your voice!’
- Other than underlining for Ofsted that you have a school council, what does this actually achieve?
Instead, we encourage schools to use the space for a Progress Board. This would allow everyone in the school to see:
- What the Smart School Council is working on
- What Action Teams are set up
- What the Action Teams are doing
- Who they talk to to get involved
- What the hold ups are (this can put gentle pressure on a slow-moving Headteacher or Caretaker to respond)
- What’s off-limits and what’s been achieved
Download a larger image of this example progress board here:
Here is a blank Word version of the progress board:
This might be useful if you can print it out at A3 size or even bigger, but we think the best thing to do is to use the image as a guide and mark it out on a large whiteboard or noticeboard using tape. You can then pin up or write in the information each week.
If you set up a board like this you need to make sure it is updated at least once a week.
To save time when you're creating your progress board, you can also use these heading cards. There's three different options for you: