EC Meeting Papers January 2019

Christopher Whitehead Language College: Christopher Whitehead has signed up their entire year group (over 200 students) for the first set of the political literacy, with the aim of expanding to the entire school within the academic year. The teacher login portal showed that most students have been signed up and are completing the required tasks and have utilised the platform and responded to the set tasks. Despite initial email issues at the start, the students have begun using the platform and the teachers are confident in the resources, using them actively throughout the sessions. The next steps would be to keep in close contact with the teacher and try to expand her use of the platform - this will mean looking at how to incorporate the other features of the platform into the school more widely. For example: running a student union election campaign through the platform. There is a clear need to improve teacher IT competency (CPD), which might be of interest for the NUT/NEU to explore. Another observation is the need to raise the level of political literacy level amongst the teaching staff. Delivering training to several of the schools, we noticed a low level of political literacy understanding amongst teaching staff (including Citizenship teachers) which confirms that we are not only aiming to improve the level of political literacy within the next generation, but also the staff teaching them.

Wren School: Tom Lecoq, Wren School teacher, said: “The students said it was really easy to navigate and easy to understand the resources.”

Summary & Expansion Despite the first couple of technical issues around school internet security and excel uploads, the platform has been an overall success. Launching in 4/10 schools within the first two months of the academic year with predictions that by early 2019 all 10 schools will be fully integrated into the platform. The students are gaining clear political literacy, becoming active within their school and all schools engaged so far, have expressed the desire to either create a student union (if they don’t have a school council already), or to reorganise their school council into a student union. This gives valuable exposure to the student about what a union is and how democracy works. Three Step Plan of Action : Step One: Becoming Politically Literate, understanding how the system you live under works and gaining the knowledge to effect it. (Basic Knowledge and assimilation) Step Two: Once the knowledge is obtained, it needs to be used within the school setting. The Shout Out platform has successfully managed to integrate both by allowing students to set up their own School