I totally agree with you. That’s the aim of the People’s budget campaign. Now more than ever, when massive cuts are being made, ordinary people should be involved in deciding how our money should be spent. When more people are involved in how public money is spent better decisions are made, even with youth. That’s what participatory budgeting is all about. And the campaign is working with community groups to help them win:
(1) Any kind of Participatory Budgeting in their area
(2) making sure it is repeated again
(3) Participatory Budgeting across the whole authority area
(4) 1% of the budget is decided using Participatory Budgeting

Inflammatory comments more than welcome, although I couldn’t agree more with your point about the need to widen things out. Thankfully, I think there is more and more recognition of the need for other student voice programmes to get more people involved – there are a couple of interesting egs at George Mitchell School, for example: http://www.phoenixeducation.co.uk/democratic-education-schools/demo-edu-george-mitchell-school.htm.

Thanks very much for linking to us via Twitter but http://www.every1counts.org.uk has no current connection to us – although we are starting to explore the possibility of getting involved.

My tuppance on the debate you’ve raised is that there is too much focus on a ‘school council’ as the only way for Student Voice to be addressed. As you raise yourself, it replicates (on a small scale) the political system of this country where a few make decisions for many with often only a pretence of consultation. These few are highly engaged, often hand-picked, articulate and politically minded – not the people who riot because their voice isn’t heard.

What we’re trying to do is help everyone get involved in conversations from the outset and form their own teams/groups to action ideas they have. Really buy into them. The problem with naming a specific set of people to deal with everything is that it’s exclusionary – it’s ‘us and them’ and once you form it, it’s first aim is to self-sustain rather than solve the problems it was set up to solve. If people take charge on specific issues they feel passionately about then they are more likely to be championed properly and therefore more likely to be addressed.

(I’m being a little inflammatory I know but I much prefer when people comment like this on my blog…)

As a bit of a challenge, though, one of the key principles of PB is that it that in order to be genuine it really needs to be for mainstream services. (More about that here: http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/documents/PB%20document%20two%20colour_lowres%20website%20version.pdf).

In the case of education, where most schools are unlikely to give students final say over mainstream budgetary decisions, there may be a trade-offup between giving students total say over a small amount of money (which happens quite often eg. student councils often have a small budget they can choose how to spend) or getting their involvement in the bigger decisions about how the overall school budget is spent. For me, the former could be seen as tokenism, whereas the latter really involves weighing up trade-offs and considering the bigger picture – a really useful experience and skill for citizenship in general.

Nevertheless, it looks like a great project – thanks for the heads up!

I have also to add that participatory budgeting within schools could be a very effective way to implement deliberation. Such pilots exist in France (Poitou-Charentes) and also in UK with Every1counts : http://every1counts.org.uk/every1counts-pledge/