Let the children build your new school website

If you’ve too many projects and not enough time, why not hand the reins to the pupils? They might do a better job of your new website than you, says Jennifer Malone ...

Having joined Walker Primary School last year, it became immediately obvious that its website did not reflect the school’s warm and child-centred culture. As part of my role as the head, I was also expected to post a weekly blog! There was so much going on in the first few weeks that I asked my colleague Kathy Salmon – the school’s learning mentor – to gather together four, able Year 6 pupils who could take over the blog. Kathy set up a meeting with these children and immediately came back to tell me that there was a problem; the pupils didn’t like the school website. Though this was far from a problem; in fact, it was a huge relief to me.

The children were really enthusiastic about the idea. Following the principles of the Learning to Lead research project (Faculty of Education, Cambridge University), which I’d used at my former school, we set up a series of weekly meetings involving the pupils and three staff sponsors, including myself, Kathy and our computer expert, Daniel. Together, the team developed a project plan and set the target of producing something user-friendly that would attract pupils and parents alike.

To start with, we asked the pupils to research other school websites and look at what they did and didn’t like. They presented the results to us and we could see very quickly that they wanted a more animated, colourful and bright website that was easier to use.

Having established how they wanted the website to look, the next stage was to seek an opinion from the wider school community – so the Learning to Lead team carried out surveys with other pupils and teachers in the school. Children gathered and analysed internal feedback and delivered a presentation to parent governors (as a way of involving parents) and a few members of staff. They had prepared pie charts of their analysis and video clips of the staff who were interviewed.

At that point, we had the go-ahead to redesign the website and so called on PrimarySite (primarysite.net), a website developer I’d successfully worked with on a previous project. We participated in a conference call with company, the four pupils and three members of staff, to discuss our requirements. Again, it was great for the children to be involved in this; it helped them to develop skills that they are inevitably going to need in later life. Although we were facilitating, the children were equal partners – they had as much input as every adult who was there.

The big reveal
When the design came through, we reviewed it with the children, who were able to advise on any design changes they wanted. As soon the final layout had been agreed, the team set a launch date and started to consider how best we could advertise our beautiful, new website.

The four, Year 6 pupils involved were asked to ‘employ’ other pupils in their year to design posters inviting parents to join us at two special launch assemblies. The week before the launch, pupils stood outside the school at the beginning and end of the day holding posters to advertise the new website.

The advertising worked. Our special assemblies on 8 May resulted in an amazing turn out by parents and, when the website was only four and a half days old, we’d had more than 1000 hits!

The whole project was a learning curve for the pupils involved, even down to the fact they originally imagined the whole thing would be done and dusted in a couple of weeks. They soon realised that all of the different elements would take time (and far longer than anticipated), which gave them a genuine flavour of the world of work. They learnt how to manage the various stages of the project accordingly.

Some of the things that adults in schools spend valuable time ‘sorting out’ can very easily be led by pupils, so why not involve them? My aim for this and all our Learning to Lead projects is for our pupils to be as involved as much as possible. It’s working really well. Our website team were able to see the project through from start to finish and build on those all-important ‘real-life’ skills.

About the author

Jennifer Malone is headteacher at Walker Primary School in Enfield.