At Plumpton High School, every student has the opportunity and responsibility to be a leader everyday. Leadership at the school occurs in many ways and through many different experiences and activities. A well planned and coordinated whole-school approach to student leadership ensures the development of leadership skills for all students. It is important for all projects, programs, initiatives, and developments to be designed to provide leadership opportunities for students and to ensure all students are able to develop the necessary skills to be leaders.
All students are involved in a multi-dimensional approach to student leadership, by developing mastery as personal leaders,
This begins in the classroom with students working productively to involve themselves in lessons, group work and class discussions, where they are giving themselves the best possible opportunity to develop Personal Leadership. Through the Citizenship Continuum all students focus on the development and practise of leadership skills.
Students who have been identified as leaders and those who would like to further develop their leadership skills, have opportunities to be involved in Peer Leadership. These are programs in the school where students work with, and support, other students. Some of the more formal peer leadership activities which are available to students include Peer Support, Peer Mentoring, Guidance leaders, PEC Sports leaders, etc. For all students less formal opportunities occur in class, for example, through groupwork, on a daily basis.
As students excel in leadership there are opportunities to be involved in more formal Public Leadership opportunities such as, School Captains, Senior Leaders, SRC, PEC SRC, Youth Ambassador, Assembly Chairs, House Captains, etc. Again for all students there are many informal opportunities to be public leaders in class and at school, on a daily basis.
At the formal public leadership level, a new broad-based leadership model has been developed to provide a better alignment of formal leadership structures and to ensure all students are represented in the decision-making processes at the school. This model came out of the Student Voice initiative and has been developed in consultation with student and staff representatives.
Advantages of Broad-based SRC Structure
aligns student leadership groups and ensures a direct link to all students through guidance classes
allows students to be directly involved in the decision-making process through the in-built link provided for the guidance class through their representative
allows for SRC to operate at the PEC, whole-school, half-school and year-group levels. In this way it has the capacity and flexibility to cater for anything from whole-school initiatives through to year-group specific activities and issues
involves students more in thinking about, and contributing to, the successful functioning and development of the school. For example, where a specific year-group issue may occur, such as cyber bullying, the SRC representatives can discuss the issues with guidance classes and the students can develop strategies to address the problem themselves.
provides many students with formal opportunities to participate in student leadership.