Exploring the origins of the Student Leadership Conference

With our Student Leadership Conference merely days away, we’ve decided to look back its the origins and how the event has developed in the three years since its inception.

Our Student Leadership Conference gathers together schools from across the East Midlands for two days of inspiring seminars and workshops, aimed at engaging and empowering their students to enforce change in their communities.

We caught up with Liz Anderson, Inspiring Leaders Trustee, to reflect on how the conference became to be the successful event it is.

“I have worked in education for almost 30 years, starting as a class teacher and moving through middle leadership to school leadership and finally to multi-academy trust leadership. My guiding principle has always been to put children at the heart of all decision making, considering their needs and their experiences – after all, they are the audience!

As a trustee of Inspiring Leaders our focus as always been on supporting school leaders and working with them to develop future leaders. It is our mission to help teachers and leaders to reach their full potential in order that they can ensure that all children have the right opportunities to succeed. We provide supportive professional networks and innovative collaborations to promote continuous school improvement and create strong, sustainable trusts.

In 2021, like most organisations, we were emerging from the pandemic and setting out our strategic goals for the next three years. We knew that covid lockdowns had impacted negatively on children’s lives and wanted to do something different, to offer them something more, to empower them to take back some control over their own experiences. Thus the concept of our Inspiring Leaders Student Leadership Conference was born.

Our inaugural conference took place in September 2022, kindly hosted by Nottingham Trent University. Our strategic partner trusts sent 4-6 pupils from each of their schools to come together to learn, collaborate, network and be inspired. It gave pupils an opportunity to experience learning beyond their own school and to get out into the wider community, something that hadn’t been possible for the past 18 months. We wanted the children to see themselves as part of something bigger than just their school and to have the opportunity to pursue their interest in climate change and sustainability. We wanted them to be able to learn from others and to be able to use that learning to develop their own understanding and to make plans to take their own actions to make positive changes in their own schools and lives.

This we achieved and more. The children reported back on how inspired they had been and what they achieved in the following academic year. They undertook a range of projects which made a difference, and which inspired their peers at school. Personally, I came away inspired by them, by their engagement and enthusiasm. If they are anything to go by then the world is in safer hands than we might have feared.

In September 2024 we are extending to two student conferences: one for our primary aged pupils and one for secondary. As in previous years, we have asked our pupils what they are interested in and what motivates them. The focus of both will be ‘Sustainability into action to transform our world’ and both will again be hosted by The Nottingham Trent University. Those we spoke to are clear that they do worry about climate change and about the impact they see or experience in terms of changes to weather, changes to environment and to the lives of animals and humans across the globe. They want to take action and feel that they are making a difference however small. They want to learn and to work together with their peers to lead change, however small.  As an old African proverb, quoted by Dalai Lama, says ‘If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito’.”