In Ontario, Canada, every school board is required to include representatives from the local Student Senate, which is composed of student trustees from each high school in the board. The student trustees represent students and ensure that students’ ideas and opinions are heard at the school board level. These student representatives have joined together to form the Student Trustee Organization which is, according to their website, “the largest student stakeholder in education and the voice for the student vision” and they act as consultants at the provincial Ministry of Education level. This is probably one of the most ambitious efforts in the world to listen to and heed “student voice” in the development of education policy, and over the years, they have impacted some major school reform efforts.
Read the whole blog post from Susan Einhorn, Anywhere, Anytime Learning Foundation (AALF) Executive Director, Student Voice, Democracy and 1-to-1.
Sylvia