Recognition: The Secret Sauce for Enhancing Student Leadership

As a English and History teacher, I adore etymology, which to my mind is nothing short of an archaeological dig into language. And so, I want to begin this blogpost on SSAT’s recognition schemes for student leadership with some etymological analysis of the word ‘recognition’.

My favourite site, etymonline, acknowledges the Old French ancestry of the word as we currently know it dating back to the 15^th century. But, peeling back the layers of time, it also picks up on the Latin origins of the word in two ways. The first is that recognition was seen as “a reviewing, investigation, examination”. The second is that recognition was seen as a method “to acknowledge, know again”.

Nothing earth-shattering there, but it illustrates the profundity of recognising someone or something: it is a process that helps us to re-view (or re-see, based on further etymological digging) to know-again and acknowledge that re-understanding.

Why is the recognition of student leadership important today?

If you want the long, research-informed answer to the question of why student leadership recognition is important, it is probably best to direct you to a previous blogpost I have written about this. You can find it here.

The short version is that research consistently shows that students view leadership in highly social and relational ways and, perhaps as a corollary of this, that school ethos, relationships and the engagement of key leaders play a critical role in effective student leadership practice.

There are also, naturally, moral and ethical reasons why student leadership, emerging from effective student voice mechanisms, should be important in today’s uncertain and fragmented world. I have also written about the way in which student leadership has a strong connection with human rights and civil rights here.

And then there are pragmatic reasons why schools should increasingly be focusing on how well they empower and recognise the achievements of students as leaders. Although I have some concerns about the new inspection framework, one aspect of it that interests and excites me is the increased focus on how schools are building holistically towards helping their students to ‘achieve’, ‘belong’ and ‘thrive’.

To my mind, student leadership should be at the centre of such efforts to enhance achievement (remember this is personal as well as academic under the latest guidance), belonging and thriving. Early evidence from inspection reports under the new framework appear to show that Ofsted are serious about the role that extra-curricular work, including student voice and leadership, plays in helping develop fully rounded young people. It has notably increased in frequency as a target for schools and, where schools are found wanting, it is linked more to ‘needs attention’ than ‘expected standard’ gradings.

In short, then, there is a moral, pragmatic and evidence-informed imperative for schools to be thinking about how they re-see and know-again the impact of their student leadership provision, both organisationally and, for the students themselves, individually.

Organisational Recognition

Drawing on our well-established individual recognition for student leaders, SSAT have created a School Recognition Scheme for student leadership provision. You can find details here.

In December last year, we were delighted to be able to recognise Ormiston Meridian Academy in Stoke as our very first Platinum Award school for their inspirational work on student leadership. Based on their submission of an audit and supporting materials, followed up by a day in school to externally validate their work in this area, we were able to support the school in re-seeing and knowing-again what they had achieved and where they could go from here.

During the process, we were able to see the way in which the school has a clear and extremely coherent approach to ensuring student voice is listened to, heard and acted upon. We also saw how they had embedded ‘Leaders of Learning’ in every classroom and for every student in the school, as well as how the school systematically empowered established student leaders to bring innovative ideas to fruition, aligned with but not controlled by adults around them.

As a result of the process, we also enabled the school to see clearly how they could further enhance their provision for student leaders by better tracking (and adjusting for) the take-up of formal roles by vulnerable students. The school also identified ways in which to strengthen the transition between outgoing and incoming student leaders to further improve their work.

Millie Campbell, the Lead Teacher for Student Leadership at Ormiston Meridian, has said…

“The School Recognition Scheme has been invaluable to our Academy, offering a meaningful opportunity to showcase how student leadership is embedded across our school and to have this recognised at the highest level. It has enabled me to reflect on our strengths and the wide range of ways we support students in developing their leadership skills, while also identifying clear next steps to further enhance our practice with the benefit of expert guidance.”

And one of the student leaders who contributed to the review, said…

“I felt nervous in the moment, but I appreciated having an opportunity to share my experiences as well as hearing the experiences of others. Having someone to input our feedback to feels like a helpful way to improve our school to better suit students.”

SSAT’s second Platinum Award school under the new School Recognition Scheme for student leadership was Haughton Academy in Darlington, who went through the process in February this year. Through their audit, documentary evidence and the school visit, we were able to help the school re-focus and look again at their work to build on excellent provision for student leaders.

At Haughton, we could see how they have systematically increased representation of students from vulnerable groups in all their formal student leadership roles. We were able to see how their local, national and international charitable work was off-the-radar in terms of its scale and scope, and to validate the levels of agency the school afforded to senior student leaders in enacting ‘legacy projects’ that genuinely left a legacy for the school and younger students.

As with Ormiston Meridian, we were able to use the re-seeing and knowing again process of our recognition scheme to help Haughton Academy get even better in its school leadership provision. Despite being incredible in their charitable work, student leaders developed plans to showcase this success. They also saw how they could further strengthen their legacy projects.

Fiona Campbell, the Assistant Headteacher in charge of student leadership at Haughton Academy, has said…

“Going through the School Recognition Scheme process proved invaluable for us; shining a light on what we were doing well – giving us confidence in these areas – whilst at the same time, enabling us to view all our practice with a critical eye and suggesting strategies we could use to further strengthen our student leadership programme. In addition to this, SSAT delivered student leadership workshops to all year groups, including pupils from our feeder primaries, which further inspired our students. Without doubt, taking part in SSAT’s School Recognition Scheme has been illuminating and encouraging for both students and staff.”

Individual Recognition

SSAT has long offered student leaders the opportunity for recognition of their contributions to their school through our Student Leader Accreditation. This year, we have strengthened our offer, creating the Student Leader Recognition Scheme which is firmly rooted in research and offers an additional layer of recognition. You can find out more about the scheme here. If you are a school that previously offered the SLA, you can get in touch with us for support in how to make the transition to the new, recognition-focused scheme.

One of our partner schools for the new Student Leader Recognition Scheme is Dyatmika School, an international school based in Bali, Indonesia. Following a training session with SSAT, staff at Dyatmika worked with us to consider how they could use the scheme not only to recognise students holding formal student leadership roles (these students would normally aim for the Gold and Platinum standards of recognition), but all their students.

They were interested in how they could construct a student leadership curriculum for their younger students within their allotted personal development time. The ambitious aim of the school was to equip all students with the foundations for effective leadership of being able to manage themselves well in relation to others, and to be able to lead within informal situations. These foundational standards, supported by the research evidence, underpin our recognition scheme’s Bronze and Silver standards.

The eight-session early leadership curriculum they have created is excellent. It begins with a reflective session on what the students see as being good leadership in others, before focusing (amongst other things) on the professional skills of leadership in their context, and the importance of empathy for leading others. Importantly, the programme finishes with family and school recognition of the ways in which the children have developed leadership competencies.

As a result, the school has been able to submit portfolios from individual students that show high levels of self-reflection of their leadership capabilities in action. Perhaps most importantly, these portfolios of their leadership include ambitious plans from students to take up additional leadership responsibilities in the future. And this outlines the key reason why we at SSAT feel that student leader recognition is so important: it is a gift that we can give to children and young people with little or no cost but which functions as an investment in their future participation.

Marie Dryden, the Assistant Headteacher leading on this work for Dyatmika School, has outlined the positive benefits of enhanced student leader recognition.

“The recognition framework has enabled us to move from viewing leadership as something held by a small group of students to something that is developed across the whole school. Through a structured leadership curriculum and targeted staff CPD, we have embedded opportunities for students to practise leadership within everyday learning, ensuring it is accessible to all. Crucially, our student leaders now understand that their role is not only to lead, but to create opportunities for others to do the same. As a result, we are seeing students become more reflective, more confident, and more willing to take initiative; often in ways they would not previously have recognised as leadership. It has been genuinely inspiring to work alongside them and see this shift in how they view themselves and their potential.”

Recognition: The Secret Sauce for Student Leadership

Of all the research insights from academics and practitioners assessing how to build effective student leadership, the one that stands out above others is that students themselves see leadership as being, in essence, a social and relational process. This insight tells us that students take on leadership to change the world around them and, fundamentally, to make things better for the people around them, particularly those facing significant barriers in life.

With this insight in mind, it is hard not to conclude that the intensely social and relational focus of recognition is the secret sauce for engaging student leaders and also those colleagues who give up their time and energies to support the work of student leaders. With all the talk about belonging nowadays, being recognised for your contribution to your community by being seen and known is the crucial social and relational process for assuring that sense of belonging.

Using SSAT’s School Recognition and Student Leader Recognition schemes enables schools to give that recognition process additional clarity and impact. Completely rooted in wider insights from research, it is intellectually grounded. Having been implemented in schools across the country and the world, it is benchmarked and robust. But, most importantly, it is an intensely social and relational process, tapping in to what we know to be important for students. And, for SSAT member schools, most elements of the process of recognition – for schools and for students – are a free benefit of your membership.

If you would like to know more about how the secret sauce of recognition can spice up your school’s student leadership offer, you can book a no-obligation call with one of SSAT’s team.

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