Smart School Councils is a teacher-led charity that helps young people to become active and democratic citizens. Our aim is for young people to leave school with a broad range of key skills to help them engage with democracy and society.
To achieve our aims, we support schools to set up Smart School Councils. It is a new and innovative approach that is being used by 360 schools across the world.
This is a whole-school approach that easily involves and develops the skills of all pupils – skills like oracy, leadership, communication and compromise. It creates system change that extends involvement from the 7% of pupils typically developing skills in traditional school councils to 100% of pupils in many schools.
Evidence suggests these ‘non-cognitive’ skills facilitate academic achievement and are particularly important in closing the attainment gap for disadvantaged pupils (Gutman & Schoon, 2013; Heckman et al 2006).
Schools can join the programme and adopt the model in two ways: