This is the first in a new series of one-minute reads on the outcomes of Monday’s workshop Empowering KS2-5 Learners through Participatory Budgeting: How do we up-skill learners to generate, present and vote for proposals on how to best spend a slice of the school budget? (And meet an endless range of curriculum objectives in harmony with the 2019 inspection framework, of course!)
A warm thank you to all participants. These one-minute reads are by no means a final account of a solution; rather, they are snapshots of the first steps in a carefully metered and never-ending schools-led evolution of an approach intended to be as impervious to policy change as it is possible to make it.*
Newcomers can read more about the event here but, in a nutshell, a number of stakeholders in education gathered together on May 20 in Birmingham for a Co-Creative Conversation on just such a Participatory Budgeting (PB) program for UK schools. Delegates represented academia, local schools and networks such as Birmingham Education Partnership and VNET, as well as specialist organisations, including the The Careers and Enterprise Company, and Institute of School Business Leadership.
In this new series of micro-articles on PB in schools, we will share insights from these discussions and attempt to connect the suggested cons and pros with the activities that helped delegates unveil them.
But, first things first. As any English teacher will tell you, there is no text without context. So, we will begin by placing the discussions about Participatory Budgeting in the ambience of the big issues of an education system which is currently sleeping on the street on a piece of cardboard in spite of an annual paycheck of £87M+. Some hints on the next instalment on the following slide:
Tomorrow’s one-minute-read will be A tale of two schools.
Previously in the series
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Take Part: Empowerment & meaningful social action in the 2019 Framework
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Participatory Budgeting in Schools? #1; The Stakes and the Stakeholders
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Participatory Budgeting in Schools #2; Progressive Traditionalism?
Other upcoming topics from Empowering KS2-5 Learners through Participatory Budgeting on May 20:
- The shortcomings of EduTwitter and the need for a different type of communication to work together towards viable long-term solutions.
- Ideal outcomes of Participatory Budgeting.
- The obstacles that confront such a program.
- Solutions and countermeasures.
- The format of the workshop and its connection to the above.
- Disentangling the erroneous conflation of Participatory Budgeting Cooperative Learning and Project-Based Learning:
werdelin.co.uk is the business end of cooperativelearning.works.
Overview of all articles on Participatory Budgeting in Schools
*) This durability is something which I hope to discuss in detail in a later article. Get notifications of related posts on Twitter or join the mailing list for updates.
cooperativelearning.works 
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