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Inspire My Teaching

Mar 13, 2022

Classroom Leadership: how to effectively choose school prefects for your subject area

How to ensure you get the right subject prefects...

School Prefects: every school seems to have them, but very few seem to have mastered the art of using them effectively. So why is this the case? And, more importantly, how can you select the ones who will save you time and improve standards? Read on to find out more...

The Historic Problem

Time after time we've all seen the "prefect thing" become a "lip service" exercise... where students often gain the title without having to "buy in" to the expectations, or the workload.

Everyone starts out enthusiastically and with high hopes of great change, but in reality this rarely seems to happen. Prefects turn up to the expected Open Evening and dawdle about (frequently checking their watches!), and the only types of questions they ask are: 'When do you think I can go home?' or 'Are there any biscuits left?'

You might be lucky and get one or two decent prefects and you may even get a bit of a classroom display put up for you ... wonkily, but still, it counts as something. Occasionally, you may win the 'holy grail' of prefects and think 'this year we'll finally get things done'... to then have them stolen away by the allure of a better school position when everyone finally realises how good they are. (And this always seems to happen partway through the year when you thought 'all your ducks were in a row'!)

It seems that (excluding the rare exception) we never seem to get 'our money's worth' when it comes to "hiring" prefects, especially not in the long term.

So why do we even bother?

Well, aside from being directed to do this, what is in it for you? FREE TIME! That’s what’s in it for you... if you get this right. (* And obviously the satisfaction that you are nurturing the hidden leadership talents of the next generation.) But mainly free time. And you'll probably think ' Yeah, right’ , but my department are now in the fortunate position where our prefects not only save us time, but actually help us raise standards too.

It sounds so obvious, but the simple truth is that it’s all about motivation. BUT, it's not simply enough to create it… the trick is sustaining it.

What's in it for them?

Let’s face it, students need motivating factors to do pretty much anything. Some you can buy off with ‘ This will look great on your UCAS application ‘ ( Yes, that ol’ chestnut!) and others you will probably have to literally buy off… with time and biscuits… and Amazon vouchers.

This being said, everyone is motivated by something, and that something is usually success. Benjamin Ball's 'Summary of Motivational Theories’ claims that individuals want to work for an establishment where they feel they are able to make a positive difference. If this moral reason fails, then helping people to feel (and look) important can be a very effective motivational tool, too. My department sustain this sense of importance by creating a student hierarchy for our subject prefects.

The Prefect Hierarchy

The Prefect Hierarchy follows a similar pattern to our own teacher hierarchy. Humans adhere to hierarchical constructs, hence the influence Religion, Monarchs and Politicians have always had over us... and why we try to curry favour with our line managers. Students follow a hierarchy in your own classroom with you as the leader they instinctively know they should follow.

Age and status are the two main ways of creating a strong hierarchy. As prefects are close in age, the only structure left is to create status roles within the subject prefect team. schools have been doing this with their 'Head Girl' and 'Head Boy' roles for decades, but I've rarely seen this idea filter into the subject prefect sphere.

My department aim to employ 5-6 subject prefects with the following roles:

Head Subject Prefect

Deputy Head Subject Prefect

Subject Prefect (specific role)

Subject Prefect

This year we've created a 'Head of Literacy Prefect' as this fits well with our department and school aim, but you could create subject prefects with different roles to suit your own department needs. However, be careful not to give every subject prefect a specific role otherwise you tend to get all leaders and no followers... and too many cooks tend to spoil the broth!

You also need to ensure that your 'Head Subject Prefect' is strong enough to 'rally the troops' and keep them in check, but is also kind enough to not become a power hungry dictator in your absence. Young adults are still in the process of learning to be adults, after all.

So, to choose wisely, you need a suitable application process…

The Application Process

With more and more demand to prepare students for their future careers, treating your school prefect application process like a “real” job interview has multiple benefits:

It weeds out the unmotivated

It provides a sense of gravitas that shows students this is important to you (and so should be to them!)

It’s an opportunity for students to gain some worthwhile interview experience (which works nicely with the Gatsby benchmarks)

It means you can better sense leadership potential for creating your prefect hierarchy

We ”advertise” the posts like a proper job interview. Students are told in lessons and emailed the job posting. The post-COVID world has made this even easier with platforms, like Microsoft Teams, allowing you to set such a thing as a voluntary 'assignment'.

We give them a job description and a deadline, and expect a letter of application that details their suitability for the role(s). It's also a good idea to get them to specify the role(s) they are interested in... this really helps to 'whittle' them down for interview. Finally, we make the benefits of the roles very apparent. It's vital to make it clear what's in it for them as we want to keep motivation levels high.

The Selection Process

Since implementing this system, we are inundated with subject prefect applications. One year we had a record 60% of our course students apply for a post... previous to this we were lucky if we got 2 applicants. However, this comes with its own problems... how do you select the right candidates for interview?

Firstly, you need to know your students. Applying for a role naturally opens you up for the possibility of rejection and that makes you very vulnerable... so managing student feedback and expectations is paramount. An innocent but flippant remark from you could really injure an applicant.

We have THREE golden rules for this:

Applicants MUST meet the deadlines and apply as requested (this instantly whittles out those who are not truly interested and applicants tend to take 'your application was too late' much better than 'we didn't feel you were suitable for interview'.

All applicants are kept confidential and are contacted separately (never as a group). This means a student has full control over whether they tell their peers or not.

Feedback must be provided following the "compliment sandwich" approach : compliment, constructive feedback, bigger compliment e.g. " We absolutely loved your energy, but we felt other candidates had more experience with running extra-curricular clubs and that’s something we really needed, however, we thought your interview answers were strong and we know that Geography are really interested in having you as a prefect".

Don't fall into the trap of interviewing everyone who applies just because you feel bad. It sends the wrong message to the stronger applicants, it wastes a lot of your time, and once people complete the interview stage they have naturally convinced themselves that they are the best person for the job. Therefore, telling them they haven't 'got the job' is much harder on them than if they aren't selected for interview in the first place. If you know it's definitely not going to work out, then don't go there.

Once we've selected students we'd like to interview, all applicants are contacted with either a 'please come to interview' or a 'thank you for applying, however...' email. The former can be very generic, however the latter I like to make more personalised and again adopt the 'compliment sandwich' approach. We tend to follow this up with a face to face conversation too.

The Interview

Again, the interview is just like those for a professional paying job... but a little bit softer. I prefer to have two people on the interview panel - it makes sense to ask one of your main A Level teachers to get involved... to give the interview more gravitas, but also to get relevant team members invested in their prefects. For extra status, you could ask a senior leader or Head of Year to help you interview.

To help with nerves and get the interviews off to a good start, we tell students in their 'please come to interview' email what the first question will be. For us, it's always 'why did you apply for this position?' We pre-decide our questions (choose 4-6 which students can elaborate on... you don't want to be there all day!) and print out answer grids for the panel to fill in and score the answers. This is a bit of extra effort, but really helps with the selection process at the end... especially when trying to decide who to appoint for each role.

Last year 15 applied, we interviewed 10, and gave out 6 positions, and the interview answer grids made the task so much easier. It also means you can give detailed feedback if requested... and helpful constructive criticism is always greatly appreciated.

The interviews are around 10-15 minutes each and for confidentiality, I like to choose a suitable meeting room away from our subject teaching area.

Make sure you tell students when and how they will hear the outcome from you and stick to this agreement. It sounds painfully obvious, but leaving people in limbo is a really good way to pee them off… yet it happens repeatedly. Just think back to your last job interview!

So there you have it, a strong methodology for getting the right prefects for your subject area. Check out the sister blog ' Classroom Leadership: how to effectively use your subject prefects in your subject area' for tips on how to save you time whilst raising standards.

For more useful ideas, check out our blogs on leadership and engagement.

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