Close friends and long-time readers of this blog will know that Student Voice and Student Leadership is a passion of mine.

Most schools have some form of student body; be it a student representative council, student leadership council, a junior school council, a student congress, or student voice – the names for these organizations are varied, but ultimately, there is a group that represents students within the school.

But… Why is such a having a student council important? And what sort of things should we be working on? I mean, they raise money and stuff, but how can we move to that next level?

In a recent blog post, Steve Brophy was challenged to respond to a series of questions and then set the following challenge to me and other members of my PLN. Here are my responses.

Having recovered from the end-of-school madness, Christmas and the New Year, I have enjoyed the opportunity to sit and rest for a few days and catch up on some blogs in my Google Reader. I've really enjoyed reading posts (and posts and posts) from both friends and members of my Personal Learning Network (PLN) about their reflections from the past year and how it has helped them set goals and directions for the coming year. I've always been one to set goals and targets for the year, but have never really reflected on my achievements from the year before. So, thanks to some help from my Outlook calendar, the following jumped out at me as achievements throughout 2011:

Being a member of a Student Representative Council (SRC) is not always about wearing a badge and missing out on classes. For some, the initial appeal wears off when they soon realise the volume of time and level of commitment required to fulfil the role effectively. This can lead to SRC members backing away their responsibilities, dragging down the SRC or choosing to opt out of the SRC all together. So, what can be done to prevent these situations fromoccurring? How do you respond to situations where the bad apples are starting to spoil the rest of the bunch?

Imagine a group of primary school students spread throughout Victoria working together to implement major projects, to provide feedback to organisations about policy and other new initiatives being implemented whilst learning about citizenship and decision making.

Sounds impressive.

At present though, all we can do is imagine, because such an opportunity for primary school students does not exist.

Thanks to the wonderful world of twitter, I was made aware of a great free online resource the other day called minutes.io  that I thought would be a great resource for student councils to be aware of.

This site allows you to generate minutes from a meeting using an online template.After entering the headings you then need to enter the details of those present. Minute.io allows for sub-headings and topics down the side and breaks these into categories of TODO, OKAY, INFO, and IDEA.

In just a few days, teachers and students will be returning for the 2011 school year. What thought have you put into how your Student Representative Council (SRC) will operate? Maybe you have been allocated the role of support teacher for the SRC but have no idea what to do. Hopefully, the information below will assist you in getting up and running early in 2011. 

One of the great jobs I have at my school is to be the staff advisor to the Student Leadership Council. Student Leadership has always been, and still is, a passion of mine. (I could easily write a whole seperate post about how I got into it and the work I have done over many years)

This Tuesday, I had the Student Leadership Council present their action plans to our principal team for their feedback and approval. This gave them a real audience to present in front of and a purpose in getting their plans completed.

These plans have been almost a month in the making. They commenced work on them at our Training Day earlier this year and they have worked on them during our subsequent meetings