PROGRESS Stories

Staff-student collaboration

Our experience in delivering the PROGRESS Programme is that the most interesting insights and creative solutions emerge from looking at the intertwined nature of staff and student experience – how each affect each other in ways that can escalate positively, but may also do so negatively.

There is a logic, therefore, in bringing students and staff together to gain deeper insight into each other’s experience and think holistically about ways of addressing the working dynamics of the school. But what is logical is not necessarily safe, and remains a brave way forward.

Where it happens, student and staff strategy groups meet independently at first then come together to look at common factors and merge their proposals.

Staff are often surprised to discover just how able students are to think constructively about issues that face them. They tend to assume that students will be unrealistic in their expectations, and insist on radical changes that are out of the question. But our experience is that students of all ages take great care to think empathically about how staff experience the school, and to suggest solutions that accord with the school’s core values.

At one school, staff and students worked separately on identifying the characteristics of a good staff-student relationship that would support the learning of every student. Both groups were astonished at how similar the lists that they drew up were. They went on to design and implement an innovative strategy for identifying the kinds of events that caused breaches in working relationships and for repairing relationships when a breach had occurred.

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PROGRESS Stories