PROGRESS Stories

PROGRESS Programme stimulates student voice

The senior team at Burn High were confident they knew the issues that would be identified by staff and students doing the PROGRESS surveys in the school. ‘We thought,’ said the assistant head, ‘that we could write a list of issues for staff and students, and we would be right.’

The PROGRESS surveys did indeed identify familiar issues for students: about not being heard in the classroom and feeling ‘done to’ in their learning; together with issues around relationships and the lack of mixing either between year groups or between different classes in the same year.

But the senior team were taken aback by level of frustration students felt about not being able to act on their perceptions of how to make things better. Had they not spent a lot of energy building an active and articulate school council?

The PROGRESS Programme enabled students to give their views on several occasions through online surveys, then have those views played back to them for response and reflection. As a result of this, the student body as a whole could start believing their views really did count.

The sustained nature of the listening created a sense of confidence and assurance among the students that enabled them to express well-formulated opinions which were taken seriously and formed the basis for action to be taken.

The council could no longer be described as a ‘talking shop’; it now had a real role to play in shaping an even better learning environment.

Click here for more information on the PROGRESS Programme.

PROGRESS Stories